Bibliology | Preservation of Scripture, Pt. 3 (02/25/2001)

I give you two choices. You can come and sing a special or you can fix that air conditioner where it'll come on. Okay. I got it all set except I didn't get it where the heat, the heat's still blinking and I need the cool to, don't we need this little air moving around?

I'm a little warm. Of course I can take this off it. I'll do that. I don't want to freeze you. I think I almost had the scooter set. I ran out of time there. Well let's get moving because we have a lot to do before lunch.

Bibliology and the Doctrine of Preservation

We're back to our study of systematic theology. We're on bibliology, which is the study of what the Bible says about the Bible. Happens to be one of my favorite topics. Is that louder than usual? Maybe not.

Seems like it is, doesn't it? You want more? Let's see what happened. Those are turned off. I know why because in the winter we don't want that blowing up here. Now we want it, but that's okay. We'll get that fixed.

We don't want a lot of it today. This is one of my favorite topics and I remember as a brand-new Christian that someone gave me a study Bible and that particular study Bible had a whole section in the back on what the Bible says about the Bible.

That was one of the first things I studied. It was a real blessing. We have studied a lot of things so far under this topic, inspiration, revelation, and so forth, and we find our way to the topic of preservation.

And so we started that two or three weeks ago and we're going to continue with that theme today. Since it's been a couple of weeks and since we have a different crowd than we had, I want to do a little bit of review.

This message this morning will primarily be a scriptural message, which you probably say amen to that. That's what it ought to be, a scriptural message, but it won't have a whole lot of history in it.

We're going to get to some history and we'll have to take one Sunday where we do discuss quite a bit of history for it to make sense to you and so you know what's going on. But I want to be so grounded in the scriptures before we do that because if not, the enemy could gain a foothold.

We must know absolutely what God says about this issue of preservation. When I say preservation of the scriptures, that's different than the inspiration of the scriptures. We talked about that in the last study, you may remember.

Inspiration is the God breathing of the scriptures from his dimension outside of time into this dimension on the earth for his people. That's when he inspired the scriptures. That happened and when Paul wrote the original epistle to the Roman Church, that was the inspired scripture.

Some call it the original, some call it the autograph. And let me ask you a question, do we have the original anywhere on the earth today as far as we know? We do not, do we? It's almost like the Ark of the Covenant, it's as if the Lord removed it so we wouldn't worship it.

But we do hold his word so highly. In fact, even the Lord said he elevated above his name, which is an amazing verse. So I don't think we have to worry too much about worshiping. I think the main problem we have is people don't esteem the word highly enough.

I don't think we have a problem of worshiping it, do you? We have the opposite problem, if anything. But anyway, if that's true that the originals are no longer with us and yet we know they were inspired and we believe in the verbal plenary inspiration of the scriptures, which we've already studied, which means every word, it means the words and then plenarily means every word, is breathed by God so that even the little words are important.

Haven't you found that to be true in your own study? Sometimes the word the or the word a can make a difference. And so the little words, they have to be from God. Now let me ask you this, if we don't have the originals which were absolutely perfect to the dot of the I and the cross of the T, but we don't have them anymore, how do we know that the Bible we have 2 ,000 years later is the one God wants us to have?

That's what we're studying in this group of studies. It's a fascinating study, but I want to tell you this, it's not talked about in hardly any church. It's discussed really very little in the seminaries nowadays because there's no argument anymore.

One side has won. I happen to think it's the wrong side, but we're studying that. We'll let you decide. I mean it's, you basically have a couple of theories as far as how the seminaries would teach it, but it isn't discussed a lot.

But I'll tell you it's as mysterious as some of the doctrines that you've studied before, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the sovereignty of God versus the will of man and the responsibility of man.

How can the two be side by side and both be true? This study is just that mysterious and yet the Lord has laid a foundation in the scriptures and I want to go back to that one more time this morning before we get into the details of this study.

And so let's go to the scriptures. Go with me to Psalm 119 and verse 52 and we're going to review just a little bit the message that I preached on this using these scriptures and I'm going to go fast through this because some of it is review.

If you want to go to the scriptures, go ahead and try, but I'm not, we've already done this once so I'm not as concerned that you go right to the scriptures. I want to review and solidify what we've already discussed.

First of all, there are seven truths. There are seven truths with regard to the preservation of God's Word. Not the giving of it, not the inspiration of it, not the pinning of it, not the originals, not the autographs, but what you have today.

There are seven truths about how God has preserved His Word and that God has preserved His Word. The first truth, and I'm going to give you these with words that I think will help you remember them. We'll use a little bit of alliteration, couldn't do it totally, but the first is His Word is promised to be secure eternally.

So you might write number one, secure eternally. And we get that from Psalm 119, 152, which says concerning thy testimonies I have known of old that thou hast founded them forever. Now the word founded, we're going to use that for our second point here in a minute.

For this first point, we're going to use two words in this verse. The first one is where it says I have known of old, and the second idea is at the end where it says thou has founded them, and the phrase forever.

Now what's interesting about it is that the phrase of old is one Hebrew word and the phrase forever is a different one, and when you put them together what we see is that the Lord's Word starts, if you remember, from one end of the spectrum and goes out.

If you go back to where time started and go just beyond that, you fall into a dimension where there is no time, where it's the I am is there. That's where it started. And then it goes right through time and goes out the other end, that's the first word by the way, which is kedem, which means the front of or the place where time began.

It's spelled Q-E-D-E-M, kedem. So the word literally started back before time began. It is an eternal book. Now it goes out the other side when you get to this word that says forever because it's the familiar word olam.

I say familiar because we've studied it in other studies before, olam, which means the vanishing point. It goes right out to the edge of time going this way into the future and drops off the other side and vanishes into eternity.

And so the Word of God is secure eternally. You can't change the Word of God. Now man can try and has and that's what this study is all about. But God will not allow it to be changed and that's our first point.

Second point is this, the Word of God is settled and we find that in the same verse, Psalm 119 152, where it says it is founded. This word founded is yasad. It's a wonderful word because it means to sit down together and it implies the counsel of God.

It implies the Godhead before time, the before time counsel of God where things were determined. And so this is a book which is determined. It is predetermined. It is already done before time starts because it starts on that end of time.

It was given down into time through inspiration. It will be preserved through time by preservation. It will go out the other end in its perfect state because it is secure eternally and it is settled by the counsel of God.

It's interesting that this word yasad has been translated at least one place in the Old Testament as the word consult or counsel. So it means to settle. The third thing that we see, and you have to go to Psalm 119 verse 89 to see this one, is that it is established.

So it's secure. It is settled. It is established or established, but I like the word established because it's a stronger word. And when you go to Psalm 119 verse 89 it says, Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.

And this word settled is natsab, spelled N-A-T-S-A-B in our lettering. That's how it's pronounced in the Hebrew and it means established. What's interesting though, it's translated and used to mean this exact thing, the best state.

Now you can find that in your Strong's Concordance. If you have one, you look up the word natsab and you find it means best state. Now best state means a lot to me in the English. I like that translation.

Established means the same thing, don't you see? I mean it has been set and it has been established as God's Word. It is in its best state. It cannot be perfected. The third, I'm sorry, the fourth thing that we see is it is God's sure word.

We find that in Matthew 24 35. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but Jesus said my word shall not pass away. In 1 Peter 1 23, so we see there that Jesus says his word is sure. So it's secure from eternity to eternity through time.

It is settled, it is established, and now we see Jesus says that it is sure. The fifth thing is it's pure. I can't alliterate anymore, but I can rhyme now. It's sure and it's pure. Okay, we get the pureness of it from 1 Peter 1 23.

Being born again not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, incorruptible, ofthartos in the Greek language. Undecaying in essence. There is no unclean matter in it to make it go bad. You understand?

We talked about that once, but it's pure. And the Psalm 12 6 and 7, we're going to go to that for our next point, which is point number six, but the first part of it verifies point number five. It talks about its purity.

It says the words of the Lord are pure words as silver tried in a furnace of earth purified seven times. I love the fact that it says in a furnace of earth because that implies that humanity was involved in the giving of the Word, the inspiration, but also in the preservation of His Word.

And we'll talk about that later as far as how God has done this, but do you see that? Isn't that beautiful? It's tried seven times, but it's in a furnace of earth. The earthy part implies us, God's people, some of which were chosen through whom God inspired the Word and penned it.

Others were chosen through time to preserve it, through copying it and copying it accurately. And so now the sixth point is that it's protected. And if you're in Psalm 12, you just go right on to the next verse, which is verse 7.

Thou shalt keep them, O Lord. And let's stop there a minute. The word keep means shomar, shomar, which means to hedge about. But now listen to this. This is very, very important. If you don't get these concepts from the Scriptures, you're going to, you will not make it through this study.

Satan will come to you and bother your mind. And that's not the purpose of this. The purpose of this is to secure your hearts and minds and the fact that you have the Word of God today. So you have to understand God's promises before we move on.

This promise is very important because it says in Psalm 12, 7, thou shalt keep them. Notice it doesn't say it. Them is important because that's where we get the idea of verbal plenary inspiration. Them means the words, the individual words are kept.

The word keep in the Hebrew is shomar, which means to hedge about. But it literally means, listen to this, to guard and attend to. That is an active word. It place, it does not place God, listen to me, as the one who gave his word down into the earth to man and then sat over here and folded his arms, just like some people think he does with everything else, that he's not sovereign.

They think he just made everything and he stepped aside over here and said, what's going to happen tomorrow? Yeah, well, there's a good person. I think I'll elect him. Oh, there's a guy who believes in me.

I'll elect him because I saw him do it. The whole church today believes like this. We don't, of course. We know God is sovereign. God is not one who makes it, sits over here and lets it go. He didn't do that with his word either.

He did not use the holy prophets of old and give it down in a perfect state and then go back, sit down somewhere in heaven and say, boy, I sure hope he makes it three times. It says in the Bible, in Psalm 12, 7, that he shomars his word.

He attends to it moment by moment. Why would we think that every petal of a flower that moves is under the hand of God and every molecule in our body is held together by the Lord Jesus of all of whom all things consist and that our children's lives and safety are in his hands.

Our spouse's fidelity and lives and safety are in his hands and our mission in life is in his hand. But he just goes like this to his word and hopes it makes it. I can't believe that, especially when the Bible says it's not true.

The Bible says he keeps it. He guards it. And now that's the sixth one. So now we have it secure eternally, comes out from one side, goes out the other. It's an eternal book. It is settled by the counsel of God.

It is established in its best state. This is all from word studies. It is sure, it is pure, and it is protected. And the last idea comes out of verse 7 also because Psalm 12, 7 says, Thou shalt keep them, O Lord.

Thou hast preserved them from this generation forever. A lot of information there that's very important in this study. The word preserved is going to give us our seventh point. But notice that it says from this generation forever.

That brings it down into time. Wouldn't you agree? If all we had was the verse in Psalm 119, 89 that says forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. I would be a little bit disturbed because I'd be thinking, well, okay, it's settled in heaven, but I'm on the planet.

Is it settled down here? But God brings this information in chapter 12, verse 7 from generation to generation. I will keep it. I will attend to it. I will guard it. I will put a hedge about it. And that's in time, generation to generation to generation, generation.

Like I said, it's going to start over here before time, but it's going to move through time safely. It's going to go out the other end and it's the same. It's his word. And it brings us to this last word, preserved.

Thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever. So lastly, it's preserved. So you put all seven of those together, it is secure. It is settled. It is established in its best state. It is sure. It is pure.

It is protected. It is preserved. Do you have that? Do we have that? Because we got to have that before we move one step further. You can't go with me if you're not here. And do you believe it's true?

Do you believe God can do this? All right, let me ask you this. Do you believe he could do it through earthen vessels? Okay, because if you don't, you're going to be in trouble here in a minute. Okay, now, last time we started a process, which I'm not going to review.

We don't have time, but we will be giving these out, so it will all be here. But we started talking a little bit about a brief history of manuscript transmission or manuscript evidence. And we went down through and we discussed some very interesting aspects of different persons who began to claim they were correcting the Bible.

That's what the modern scholars say they're doing. Actually, they're changing it, but they say they're correcting it to make you feel like you're getting a better one. Now, let me ask you this. If God is keeping it, why do they have to correct it?

You might say, well, that's how God keeps it, is these people correct it. Well, I've got some questions for you to answer in just a few minutes. But we studied some of these things and we brought it all the way down to the Vaticanus and Sinaticus and pointed out that the Westcott-Hort theory, which is predominantly used in all the modern versions, other than the King James version, all the modern versions use their line of manuscripts.

And we talked a little bit about their lives, pointed out they were merry worshippers. We pointed out that one of them was involved in witchcraft and so forth. They were not what you and I would consider to be believers at all.

And yet, all the seminaries today, most of the Bible colleges today, except for a few, accept their theories. And what's interesting is there is really no, as far as I can tell, or very few, maybe not any, living scholars who are proponents of the older view that we're going to be discussing.

It's interesting, though, that the Bible that came from a view that was different than the Westcott-Hort view, the King James version, was the one that God has blessed in history. You can follow the line through the traditional texts, the received text.

It comes down to Martin Luther's German Bible. As the Renaissance came to the world, light came in both the scientific arena, but also in the religious arena as they pulled out of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Bible that Martin Luther had was the same as your King James Bible, only it was in German. It was not like the modern translations that we have, because they come from two different lines of manuscripts.

The one that's in the Martin Luther's Bible and many, many other, as you trace the line of godly people all the way back to within 150 years after Christ to the Waldenses and some of the Italian, the Italic Church, which we'll discuss the Italic version a little bit, all of those are the same as the Textus Receptus that the King James comes from.

And that is the Bible that was used by Billy Sunday with over two million people recorded that came to know the Lord through his preaching of that version of the Scriptures. Over a million under Dwight Moody, over a million under Wesley, Whitfield, same number under Mordecai, Ham, and Spurgeon, they all used the received text.

There is no recorded evidence in history of anyone ever using the other line of manuscripts that all our modern versions come from in any revival of whatsoever resulting. That is a fact of history. Now, we went into a brief discussion at that point of manuscript transmission, and that's the part that will let you get the other study to review that.

But I wanted to refresh your minds on those issues. So let me continue then with further study of the evidence before us, the manuscripts that we have. And I'm not going to go into detail today because we're almost out of time.

I wanted to stick mostly with the Scriptures today, but we'll take a look at that. We will just begin it today. The place I want to start is really kind of in the middle of this study on what evidence do we have, and it deals with all the manuscripts.

And you basically have about six or seven different sources, and I'm going to skip right now to the fourth one, which is called the Church Fathers. The reason I want to skip to that to start is because it's going to give you a little bit of a framework to kind of get a general idea.

We won't get into the specifics today, but I want you to get the general idea because this is deep information. It's difficult to follow it, extremely difficult. So if we'll get a general outline, it really helps to put it in place.

So I'm going to talk about the Church Fathers. The reason they're important, they're not like the Gospel because they weren't even all saved. But it is important because sometimes they'll have a sermon, an old sermon you can go find that an early Church Father wrote that maybe lived only 150 years after Christ died.

And it will contain a verse, just like when we preach today, it'll have Bible verses. So you can go back and find if a verse agrees with the Bible you have, or if it's been removed by the modern translations.

If it's been removed, you have to ask why. If a preacher was preaching at 150 AD, why is it not in the modern translation? And they're saying, well the ancient and better manuscripts don't contain it.

Then how did the preacher get it at 150 AD? That sort of concept is why this is important. But I'm not going to go completely into that today. What I want to give you is the three divisions of the Church Fathers.

Now you might, you don't have to jot it down, you're going to get this outline in the next couple of weeks. But sometimes it helps me remember when I jot things down anyway, so you might want to. The first division is the Western division of the Church Fathers.

Now don't try to write these names down because you will get this handout later, but that's Irenaeus. Some of these names you will have heard. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Jerome, and Augustine. From the Western group of Church Fathers, this predominantly is what we would think of as the budding Roman Catholic Church with its emphasis on tradition rather than on the Word of God.

So if you have Church Fathers or manuscripts that come from this family, it's interesting. Not only are the Church Fathers divided into these three divisions, but the scholars divide the manuscripts predominantly in these same three divisions.

That's why I'm giving it to you now. But if you see something coming out of this tradition, you have to understand it has a strong influence from Roman Catholic thought. The Vaticanus, as I've already told you, is called that because it came from the Vatican Library.

It was found in the 1400s in the Vatican Library in almost perfect condition. It dates back to about 350 AD. But anyway, that's from the Western tradition. Now it's interesting, out of those names that I mentioned, Tertullian is an exception to the rule because late in his life he left the Roman Catholic Church.

He was about 150 AD. He was one of the first people to... He was like a few thousand years before Martin Luther. He did the same thing Martin Luther did. He came out from them and joined a different group that was not called the Catholic group.

So he is an exception and he is more trustworthy for that reason. Tertullian, remember that name. Second group is called the Alexandrine Fathers. Alexandrine Fathers or Alexandrian Fathers. This includes Clement, Origin, which we've studied already.

And he is the really bad one. He is responsible for nearly every corruption that you'll find in any Bible on the earth today. Origin is his name. You won't find him in heaven unless he got saved on his deathbed.

But somehow I sense that he probably was Satan's seed because he corrupted God's word with a butcher knife. And his name was Origin. He is one of the Alexandrine Fathers. Another one is Didymus and then Athanasius and then Cyril.

C-y-r-i-l. You would have heard of some of those. The Alexandrine group is from Egypt, obviously. And they are very similar to our modern style of textual critics. They were not necessarily saved men, but they were highly educated, used scientific methods, the same methods you would use to determine if, say, a book by Plato were accurate or not.

Textual criticism, they used these things. In some cases, they were heretical. For example, Origin, the one who's responsible for the most changes in the Scriptures, believed that Jesus Christ was a created being.

He did not believe Jesus was God. So he was a heretic. So these, we would just call them the scholarly revisers. That's how long ago it started. The third group is called the Antiochian Fathers, sometimes called the Syrian Fathers.

It produces what we sometimes call the Byzantine text. It's all from the same part of the world. The Antiochian Fathers. Now, when I start naming these, you will have heard of some of them because some of them are in direct line with the apostles.

And I'm going to go into a little bit of Scripture on this, and then we'll be finished for this morning. So I'm not going to take you any deeper. So don't worry. We're there. We're in the water and we're swimming.

We're not going to dive much deeper today. But I want to focus on this group, the Antiochian Fathers. Let me give you the names. Ignatius. Polycarp. Anybody ever heard of Polycarp? Lucian. Diodorus. Chrysostom.

You've heard me quote from him before. And Theodoret or Theodore. Those all lived from 35 A .D. up to through the year 457 A .D., and they were from the Antiochian Fathers, which means the Syrian part of the world.

You hear of Antioch in the Scriptures. In fact, I want us to go to the Scriptures at this point. Go to Acts chapter 13 and verse 1. I'm going to show you two important things. And then I want to make a point and we'll be through.

The predominant concept in those who determine what is the Word of God today, who I believe are in error, predominantly, because their methods are wrong. But their method is to use what they call textual criticism, and they're always striving to come up with what they call a neutral text, which they would say has not been tainted by anything.

No corruptor ever got to it. We're going to judge everything by that text. The predominant view, according with Westcott and Hort, was that the Vaticanus was the neutral text, which is from the Vatican Library and so forth.

You know a little bit of the history. We'll go into more detail on that later. I believe that that's false. I actually believe the Vaticanus, my personal belief after my studies, is that it is part of, that its origin was from the man named Origen when he wrote his epics, I can't say it.

It's funny, I just drew a blank on it. I won't try to say it right now because this is on tape. We'll get to it a little bit later. I'm tongue twisted on it. It starts with an H, has an X in it, and ends with an A.

You'll know it when we get to it. But when he wrote that, it had four columns where each column differed. So it's kind of like if you bought a parallel Bible today and you got four columns, they don't say the same thing.

I don't know if you ever thought about that or not, but if the words are inspired and the words are kept by God, that should bother you, that they're all different because that means you don't know which one's it.

So what are you going to teach your children and your grandchildren? What are you going to live by? And you say, well, the basic stuff's all there, yeah. You got to admit 90 of it's got to be there or nobody would call it a Bible.

But it's the 10 that I worry about, the little bit of leaven that leavens the whole lump, as Jesus says. So anyway, they think that as they come to this study and they're going to use textual criticism and they're going to use this neutral text, which is the Vaticanus, and they're going to judge thousands of other manuscripts that may agree and they won't use that word anyway because the neutral text doesn't have that word.

That's how they do this. And they believe that that's the way that God preserved it. If that's true, then we did not have the word of God really until the time of Westcott and Hort, which was in the 1800s.

So that means all of the church before that had a corrupted Bible. All of their great revivals, all the people who were burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English and so forth, they didn't have the right Bible anyway.

I find that hard to believe. But that's what they would have, that's the conclusion you would have to draw. You would also have to draw this conclusion. If Westcott and Hort are correct, then God did not keep his word because it obviously wasn't kept when they found it and they had to fix it.

God was not attending to it for thousands of years until they found it. For almost 1800 years, God did not attend to it. So he had to have these unbelievers, I'm telling you they were unbelievers, to fix it.

Now that is one theory for how we get our Bible. I don't buy it, but it is one and it is the predominant theory by all living scholars and even the good seminaries and fortunately even some of the Bible colleges that you would esteem highly in our country.

But it's usually because the men haven't done a study like we're doing right here together. If they would just do this study, they'd change their mind. I really, really believe it. They accepted what they heard in seminary and they never looked into it.

That's what I believe. So let me go to the scriptures and show you why it is and why it's important to understand that if you're going to follow God's line of scriptures, you cannot use their theory because you cannot be neutral.

Let me ask you, neutral means this. If you had several people sitting on the front row, excuse me, I don't mean to be talking about you too, but if you had several on the front row and you had some godly people, we'll let that be y 'all, and then you had a murderer and you had a thief and an embezzler and a prostitute sitting on the front, they all were copying Bibles.

If I'm neutral, I will not weight any of those any heavier than the others. Are you following me? I mean, this one over here may be the oldest and the prostitute copied it. And this one over here that the godly people, maybe a thousand years down in history and they were copying it, but I know they were godly and I've got my hands on this one.

And I know this was a person who doesn't believe Jesus is God, but it's older. Now the neutral would say, I will use this one because I can't, I have to be fair across the board. I don't weight any of them any heavier than others, but this one's older, so I'm going to use it.

I can't buy that. Now let me show you why. You have these three families, the Western, which is predominantly a Roman Catholic tradition. You have the Alexandrian, which comes out of Egypt, and which is a scholarly, an unsaved scholarly's approach.

And then you have the Antiochian. Now let me show you where Antioch is in the world. Picture a world map, and this is where these documents mostly come from. And it's this place mentioned here in Acts chapter 13.

I want you to notice who these people are. I mean, these are the people who started making these copies. This is where this tradition and this line of manuscripts started. These are the first people who copied them and they passed it to their children, their grandchildren, their grandchildren, and so forth.

Now there were in the church that was at Antioch, and that is the part of the world where these lines of manuscripts come, and that's why they're called the Antiochian Fathers, or the Assyrian text, the Antiochian text.

At Antioch, certain prophets and teachers, as Barnabas, you ever heard of him? And Simeon, that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Mannion, which had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch and Saul, as they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them, and they fasted and prayed, laid hands on them, and they sent them away.

The first recorded missionaries, listen, we're about through, let's pay attention, the first recorded missionaries in history came from this church. They were sent out after fasting and praying, and this is the church that began to copy the Word of God.

And this is where it started with this line. Now turn to Acts 11 .26 for me. Acts 11 .26, And when he had found him, he brought him unto Antioch. And it came to pass that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church and taught much people.

So this church was discipled by the Apostle Paul, and the disciples were there first called Christians. Now, I want you to remember that this is the area, the geography from which the Syrian text, sometimes called the Byzantine text, or the Antiochian text, it's all the same thing.

This is where it comes from. Now, let me just ask you a logical question. Would you think that you would wait a manuscript that comes from that group of people, Bible-believing, soul-winning, Bible-preaching people, heavier than you would a manuscript that comes from the Vatican Library or that comes from Alexandria in Egypt?

What does the Bible say about Rome? In Revelation, it calls it the city of seven hills. What does it say about Egypt? What does the Bible say about Egypt? What does it typify throughout the Bible? The world system.

And then you have Antioch, which is the first place where they were called Christians and the first missionaries were sent out, Bible-believing, soul-winning people. So do you see how the neutral modern approach is not valid?

At least to me, it's not, not logically. And that sets the groundwork now for then for us to go in and study the manuscripts, and that's where we'll begin next time. Let's stand and have a word of prayer.