Lesson 4: The Doctrine of Inerrancy

Kootenai Church

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All right, good morning, everyone. As I promised, but not as Carol was telling everybody,

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I'm back at Sunday school this morning. All right, so, looks like there's gonna be a lot of people who show up late for Sunday school.

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You get extra credit, yes. Not sure it makes up for a lost hour of sleep, but you get points, they really don't mean anything.

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Okay, I'm gonna begin by reading Psalm 19, and I'm gonna read verses seven through the end of the chapter, and then a passage out of Psalm 119, and then we'll open in prayer.

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Psalm 19, beginning of verse seven. The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. The testimony of the

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Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.

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The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever.

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The judgments of the Lord are true, they are righteous altogether. They are more desirable than gold, yes, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb.

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Moreover, by them, your servant is warned, in keeping them there is great reward. Who can discern his errors?

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Acquit me of hidden faults. Also, keep back your servant from presumptuous sins. Let them not rule over me, then

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I will be blameless and I shall be acquitted of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, oh

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Lord, my rock and my redeemer. And then Psalm 119, I'm gonna read verses 89 through verse 96.

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Forever, oh Lord, your word is settled in heaven. Your faithfulness continues throughout all generations.

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You established the earth and it stands. They stand to this day according to your ordinances for all things are your servants.

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If your law had not been my delight, then I would have perished in my affliction. I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have revived me.

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I am yours, save me, for I have sought your precepts. The wicked wait for me to destroy me.

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I shall diligently consider your testimony I have seen a limit to all perfection. Your commandment is exceedingly broad.

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All right, let's bow together in prayer before we begin. Father, we are grateful for your word.

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Again, we say this each and every week. We sometimes say this each and every day, but we can never really express the gratitude that we have to you for providing for us a clear revelation of your truth, giving us your

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Holy Spirit so that we might understand it and know it and have it illuminated to our hearts and our minds. We thank you that you accomplish your purposes through your word, through the preaching of your word.

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You save sinners, you sanctify us, and you secure us, you preserve us, you mold us and shape us into the image of Christ, and it is truly a delight to be able to read your word and to have your word.

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And I pray that our time here this morning may help us to appreciate and understand and really grasp the truth of your word and how you have preserved it for us.

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We're so grateful that we have this time and that you have brought us here. We pray that you would watch over us and guide the teaching, guard our thinking and our hearts today, that they may be affected by your truth and sanctified by your truth and by your word.

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We pray that we'd walk away from here more confident in your word and trusting more in it and loving it even more.

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We ask this in Christ's name, amen. All right, we're starting lesson four, which is inerrancy and preservation, and we're dividing this into two

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Sundays. We're gonna deal with inerrancy this week, and the next Sunday we'll deal with the preservation of scripture, the doctrine of the preservation of scripture.

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And then after that, after next Sunday, I'll be taking a break from the Sunday school class, the Sunday school hour for a while, and Jess and Cornell will jump back in for a few weeks, a couple months, whatever that's gonna be, and we'll announce when we're gonna pick this study back up again.

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So today we're looking at inerrancy, and just to review really quickly, we talked about what the doctrine of inspiration means, what we mean by verbal inspiration and plenary inspiration, and then we looked at what the

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Bible teaches concerning itself, and then we asked, does the scripture give evidence that it is a divinely inspired document?

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And of course, it's important to establish the inspiration of scripture, both from the testimony of scripture as well as from outside of scripture, because it really doesn't matter if it has been preserved for us accurately or faithfully or not if it's not indeed the word of God.

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If it's not the word of God, then what do we care if it's been accurately preserved? If it's not the word of God, and then we shouldn't care if it has all kinds of corruptions and errors and we can't know what the original is because why would we care if it's not

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God's word? But if it is God's word, then of course, by logical necessity, we would expect that it would be inerrant and that God would preserve it for us.

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So we're looking at how all of these doctrines tie together. There are two things that must necessarily and logically follow from the fact that God's word is inspired, from the doctrine of inspiration.

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That's why we began with the doctrine of inspiration, because from that doctrine, then, there are two things that we can know for certain that are logical necessities.

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If Scripture is inspired, if it's God -breathed, it's a divine book that God has given to us, then the

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Bible must be inerrant. And then second, God must preserve his word.

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Those things are really conclusions to an argument because when we make the argument for the preservation of Scripture or that what we have today is what

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God originally wrote, we don't begin by saying, look, God preserved his word and we have it here and nobody's touched it and there's been no corruptions and we know that what we have is what was originally given.

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That's not where we begin our argument. We begin our argument with the doctrine of inspiration. If it's God -breathed, then it must be inerrant.

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And if it's God -breathed, then he must preserve his word. And you'll see how all of these tie together here in the next two weeks.

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So today, we're looking at biblical inerrancy, the doctrine of inerrancy. And I believe that all three of these doctrines, the doctrine of inspiration, the doctrine of inerrancy, and tied to that is the doctrine of infallibility, and we're gonna cover that this morning as well.

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So inspiration, inerrancy, and preservation, those three truths, I believe that those are the three spiritual instincts of the child of God.

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I believe that that's something that Christians know instinctively. We who have been born again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, that we have trusted in the truth, we have obeyed the truth, we have heard the word of God preached.

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When we are regenerated, and our hearts are renewed, and our minds are renewed, and we are indwelt by the spirit of God, I think that one of our spiritual instincts is the belief that God's word is true, that it's inspired.

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And by instinct, I mean that we know this intuitively. This is something that Christians have to be educated out of, true

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Christians. We know instinctively, we know intuitively that the Bible is the word of God, and we know intuitively that if it is the word of God, then it's without error.

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And we know intuitively that if it's the word of God, and it is without error, that God has preserved it.

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If God is able to give it to us, he is able to preserve it. So these three things that we're talking about here at the beginning of this study, these are spiritual instincts,

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I believe, that intuitions that the real child of God has. It has to be something, to deny these three doctrines is something that Christians have to be educated into doing.

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In other words, you go to a liberal seminary, and you have people bombard the truth with their errors, and their presuppositions, and their lies, and then you will begin to doubt scripture.

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But a truly born -again believer in Jesus Christ instinctively and intuitively understands these things.

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So let's look at biblical inerrancy, or inerrancy as a biblical necessity. This is number one in your outline.

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Inerrancy is a natural conclusion to the Bible's teaching on inspiration. So we really have three propositions, or two propositions and a conclusion here.

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And this is a syllogism that I've offered you. Number one, God has spoken, and I have every reason to believe that we have established proposition number one.

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There is a God, and he has spoken. So number one, God has spoken. Number two, God cannot lie or err.

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He cannot lie or err, and therefore, the Bible, what God has spoken, is without error. That's a logical syllogism.

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It's an argument that we make. God exists, he has spoken. If he has spoken, because God cannot err, therefore what

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God has said or spoken is without error. And that's what we mean when we talk about biblical inerrancy.

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We're talking about the fact that it is, the scripture is without error. Any questions about what we've laid out here thus far before we get into this point a little bit further?

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Any questions? Makes sense what I'm talking about? Okay, if God has spoken, he has. If God cannot lie, then what he has spoken is without error.

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All right, letter A. The Bible teaches that God cannot lie, and I've just put together a series of scripture references there.

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Number 2319, God is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent.

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He has said, and will he not do it, or has he spoken, and he will not make it good. 1 Samuel 15, 29, also the glory of Israel, will not lie or change his mind, for he's not a man that he should change his mind.

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This idea of lying, you'll notice that the concept of lying and of errancy is uniquely a human quality.

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It's not something that can be part of God's nature at all. Psalm 89, 35, once I have sworn by my holiness,

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I will not lie to David. Why does God able to say that he will not lie? Because he cannot lie. Titus 1, verse two, in the hope of eternal life, which

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God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago 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.

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Second Timothy 2, 13, if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. That's another way of saying

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God cannot lie. So God has a certain inability. When we talk about God's omniscience, sometimes as Christians we say that God can do anything.

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Is that a true statement? There are a bunch of things that God cannot do. He cannot lie, he cannot deny himself, he cannot break his word.

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There are a list of things that God cannot do, but these things are not weaknesses in God. When we say that he cannot do something, that's not a weakness.

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The fact that we can lie is a weakness in us. The fact that God cannot lie is not a weakness, it's a perfection in him, because he can only do that which is true.

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Can God make a round square or a square circle? Can God make a rock so big he can't lift it?

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These are all ways of trying to trip us up as Christians on our belief in the omnipotence of God, that God can do anything.

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God cannot violate the laws of logic, because God is the laws of logic. So of course God cannot make a round square or a square circle.

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Why can he not do those things? Because it is a violation of the laws of logic to have a round square or a square circle.

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So we believe that God cannot do certain things, and preeminent among those is the fact that God cannot deny himself, he cannot lie, and if God has spoken, he must surely bring it to pass.

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Okay, letter B, the Bible teaches that God's word is true truth. John 17, 17, sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth.

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2 Samuel 7, 28, O Lord God, you are God, and your words are truth. 2

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Samuel 22, 31, the word of the Lord is tested, he is a shield to all who take refuge in him. Psalm 12, verse six, the words of the

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Lord are pure words. Psalm 19, verse seven, the law of the Lord is perfect. Psalm 18, verse 30, the word of the

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Lord is tried. Psalm 119, verses 151, 142, 140. You see that there, all your commandments are truth, your law is truth, they are very pure.

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1 Peter 1, since you have an obedience to the truth, purified your souls for sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again, not of seed, which is perishable, but imperishable, that is through the living and enduring word of God.

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And you have there in 1 Peter 1, all of these doctrines really, the fact that God's word is truth, that it is true truth, that it is living, and that it is enduring, and that would be tie in with the doctrine of preservation.

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In Proverbs 30, verse five, every word of God is tested, he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. So the

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Bible teaches that God cannot lie, and the Bible teaches that God's word is truth, these are things that scripture affirms of itself concerning its own character and nature, and concerning God's inability to err.

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And so all we're doing is trying to prove our syllogism that God has spoken, that God cannot err, that means he cannot lie, cannot deny himself, cannot violate his word, he cannot commit any kind of error.

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And so if God has spoken, and he cannot commit any kind of error, then it logically follows that the

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Bible is without error. So that is the doctrine of inerrancy as a biblical truth, a biblical necessity.

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Are there any questions? All right, this is all easy stuff, right, so far? It's getting better.

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Inerrancy as a logical necessity. Inerrancy as a logical necessity. Now, inerrancy is the logical result, and necessary result of biblical inspiration.

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You cannot have a Bible that is erroneous and a God who cannot err. Make sense, I want you to see that inconsistency.

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If God cannot err, then you cannot have a word from him that is erroneous, or has an error in it.

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And so for Christians, there are Christians who would say they would deny the doctrine of inerrancy, because I think you can be a

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Christian and deny inerrancy, but once it's demonstrated, but you can be wrong about that doctrine. I think there are

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Christians who are wrong about that doctrine. But once again, as we've said about other doctrines, once the scripture is pointed out to you, the truth is pointed out to you, a true

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Christian will embrace the doctrine of inerrancy. Some Christians are weak, and they're untaught, and they don't understand that scripture is without error, and one of the logical arguments that we use here, the logical necessity, is that you cannot have a

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God who cannot err, yet he speaks things that have error in it. All right, so this is an essential issue for the church in order for it to maintain orthodoxy, because biblical orthodoxy requires and demands a doctrine of inerrancy.

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It is an unorthodox belief to affirm that the Bible has errors in it, or to affirm that scripture can err in anything that it says.

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I'll say it again, it's a violation of biblical orthodoxy to affirm, sorry, to deny inerrancy, or to affirm that the

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Bible can err or does have errors in it, and the ability to err is what we call infallibility.

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So those who would deny this doctrine are outside of the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. Letter B there, oh no,

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I don't have B on your outline. To compromise the doctrine of inerrancy begins us down a slippery slope, and here,

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I wanna demonstrate this to you. If you cannot trust historical and scientific and testable details in scripture, the history and the testable things of scripture, if you cannot trust those things, then you are not going to be able to trust spiritual things that you cannot trust, or you cannot test or verify.

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If we deny the things in scripture that we can test and verify, if we suggest that they are in error, then we are not going to be able to affirm with any certainty that the things that scripture says which we cannot affirm, that they are without error.

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Let me give you an example of this. If you're, say, talking to a man on a subject, and he seems like he's educated on the subject, he seems like he should know what he's talking about, but then halfway through the conversation, he starts to say things that are in error.

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He sounds like an expert, but then he just starts making all of these mistakes. Now, he might be talking about a subject that you really know nothing about except for a few things, but then when he touches on the few things that you do know something about, he's in error on those things.

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What does that make you think about all the things that he said that you aren't able to test or verify that you don't know anything about?

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Do you consider him an expert on it? You wouldn't, right? I was listening to a podcast one time on international exchange currencies.

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I know it sounds fascinating, doesn't it? Because that's the kind of time I have on my hands. So, international exchange currencies, and I was talking about the

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American dollar and the euro and all the different international currencies, and international exchange currency is a currency that nations will invest in and buy up other currencies that are more stable than their own currency, and so I was talking about how this is going on in the markets around the world and whether the

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US dollar is gonna remain an international exchange currency, et cetera. It's a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't know anything about other than just briefly what an international exchange currency was.

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So, she was talking about the markets and everything that was going on with the markets and whether they were stable or volatile and whether they'd be trusted and what the trends are gonna be and all this.

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I was listening to all this thing, and this is great. Then at one point, she referred to the Canadian currency as the loonie, the

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Canadian loonie. So, you have the American dollar, the European euro, and the Canadian loonie.

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So, some of you are laughing, some of you are not sure what to do with that. Is Canada's currency the loonie?

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One of their coins is, which coin? The dollar bill is called the loonie because it's a coin that has a loon on it, and so they call that the loonie, right?

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So, two loonies for this candy bar or whatever it is. So, she started referring in this podcast to the

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Canadian currency as the Canadian loonie, and the American, now, I might think some

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Canadians are loonie, but that's a different issue. But to call the Canadian, I spent a little bit of time in Canada.

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I mean, I do have some connections up there. I know that the Canadian currency is called the Canadian dollar, not the Canadian loonie.

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So, when she made that error, and continued to make it all the way through this podcast, what did that do to my confidence in all of the other things that she was saying that I really could not verify and knew anything about?

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I laughed, and then I stopped listening to the podcast, because if you don't know what the Canadian currency is by the people who live right next door to us, why should

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I trust what you are saying about other international currencies in the state of those currencies? Well, it's the same thing with Scripture.

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Jesus said, if I've told you earthly things, and you don't believe me, how will you believe me if I tell you heavenly things? And if I tell you physical things about reality, which you can test and verify, and you do not believe me, then when

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I tell you things about heaven, something you've not seen and cannot see, and you can't go there, how will you believe me about those things?

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And the same applies to Scripture. If we say that the history of Scripture has errors, then some of the doctrines of Scripture have errors, but we can trust a lot of the spiritual things that are in Scripture.

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If we can't trust that God can get historical details right, why should we trust that he can faithfully reveal and preserve to us the spiritual details that we cannot verify?

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That make sense? So there's a logical necessity to this doctrine of inerrancy. There's no good reason, there's no good argument, there's no proof of any inaccuracy or contradiction in Scripture which might cause us to doubt the doctrine of inerrancy.

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And there are allegations of dozens and dozens of supposed contradictions in Scripture.

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None of them stand up when you examine them in their historical context. Nothing in archeology has ever overturned a biblical statement or truth.

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There's no logical, rational, biblical, theological, or necessary reason to deny the inerrancy of Scripture.

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So that's inerrancy as a logical necessity. Now let's talk about inerrancy as a historical doctrine. This is not a new doctrine, this is not something that I invented, this is not something we wrote into the doctrinal statement at Kootenai Community Church some years ago when we updated it and made it more robust.

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Nor is this the result of the Reformation. This is not something invented in the 1500s by Luther and Calvin and Knox and Zwingli and the others who pioneered the

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Protestant Reformation. This is a doctrine that, as we have seen, goes back logically and biblically to Scripture itself.

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If God has spoken and God cannot err, then Scripture is without error. That's the syllogism that stands.

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So this doctrine is not invented in the Reformation or by me. Augustine, who, when did

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Augustine write? In the 200s, 3rd century, late 2nd, 3rd century, somewhere in there. Augustine said this.

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I have learned, quote, "'I have learned to yield this respect and honor "'only to the canonical books of Scripture.'"

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That is only to those 66 books which we have. "'I have learned to yield this respect and honor "'only to the canonical books of Scripture.

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"'Of these alone do I most firmly believe "'that the authors were completely free from error.

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"'And if in these writings I am perplexed "'by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, "'I do not hesitate to suppose "'that either the manuscript is faulty "'or the translator has not caught the meaning "'of what was said or I myself have failed to understand it.'"

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Close quote. Now, that's a good quote. Because what is he doing? He's saying, if I see something in Scripture that I think doesn't comport, seems to contradict, that I think might be an error, there are a lot of other options ahead of denying the inerrancy of Scripture.

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I might assume that there's some aspect of the manuscript that I'm reading that was not copied accurately or it was illegible, or I might suppose that the person who translated it into my language got something wrong and failed to get the sense of that word when they got it in there.

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Or I might even suppose that there's some blind spot in myself that would keep me from seeing what is true and understanding it, right?

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That should be our default. If we see something we think contradicts in Scripture, some error in Scripture, our number one default should be there must be something wrong with me and my understanding of it.

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And that really is the humble position of a child of God who would approach Scripture and say, I'm going to assume that there's something about this that I don't understand, and so I'm going to study to figure out what it is.

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What's my blind spot that makes me think there's an error here? So Augustine's stance there in that quote,

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I firmly believe the authors were completely free from error, and if I see something that perplexes me, I assume this or this or this, but never that Scripture is wrong or that it is erred.

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Luther. Oh, by the way, this is something that we do to every other work that we read. I've been, have you ever been reading a book by somebody and maybe it's a book on a subject and you read something later on the book that you think, that doesn't seem like what he said back in an earlier chapter.

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Now, I've had that happen, and you know what I do? Do I think that the author is schizophrenic or that he got it wrong or that he contradicted himself?

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No, you know what I do is I go back and I find the previous quote and I try and see, I must have understood what he was getting at earlier if now he's saying what seems to me something different.

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And so I will grab those two places in that book and I'll read them side by side, try and work through again the argument that he's making earlier in the book, see if it comports with the argument that he's making later in the book.

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My instinct is to assume that the author knows what he's talking about, and if I come across an error,

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I make the assumption that I have misunderstood something. So I do that with, I do that, we do that with books that we read now that are written by mere men.

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And so we ought to give the same benefit of the doubt, the same deference to Scripture. Luther said this, quote, the Scriptures have never erred.

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The Scriptures cannot err. It is certain that Scripture would not contradict itself, it only appears so to the senseless and obdurate hypocrites, close quote.

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That's classical, that's classical Luther right there, right? To affirm that Scripture has never erred, cannot err, and could never contradict itself, it only appears to senseless hypocrites.

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And this has always been the view of the church, this has always been the spiritual instinct of the Christian, and as I said earlier, something you have to be learned out of if you're a believer.

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Somebody has to convince you that the doctrine, that Scripture can err. That's something that people have to convince a true child of God of.

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All right, let's talk about some objections to inerrancy, and I have a few of them here. Are there any questions before we move on to the objections?

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No? Okay. We're gonna talk about some objections to inerrancy, and then as part of this, we're gonna tie in the doctrine of infallibility as well.

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Objection number one, to err is human, the Bible is written by humans, therefore the Bible has errors. Now I offered you a logical syllogism, a logical syllogistic argument earlier that God has spoken,

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God cannot err, therefore what God has spoken is without error. That's a logical, it's structured as a logical syllogism, two premises and then a conclusion.

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There's two premises and a conclusion in this argument as well. Look, humans make mistakes, to err is human, humans make mistakes, the

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Bible is written by humans, and therefore the Bible has errors. Now how would you answer that? The second premise is wrong, that the

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Bible's written by humans. It was, though, wasn't it? Didn't Paul write it? Didn't John write it? Oh, okay, so you're saying that God himself is behind it, and you would get out by affirming inspiration, that God is inspiring it.

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Ken? Yeah.

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Yep, and here's what Ken is getting at. The second premise of the argument, to go back to what

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Mike was saying, the second premise of the argument is not the totality of the truth concerning Scripture. There's something missing in the second premise, and that is that God was superintending the writings.

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So the second premise is incomplete in terms of what is true regarding Scripture. But also, the argument itself is invalid, because in order for the argument, in order for the conclusion to be valid, the first premise would have to be that humans always err when they write, and the

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Bible was written by humans, humans had a hand in it, therefore the Bible has errors. So the first premise has to be that humans always err when they write, meaning that everything that humans write has to contain errors in it.

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Now, is that premise true? Now, logically speaking, if one of your premises is untrue or incomplete, then the structure of the argument breaks down.

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So you would have to affirm, you would have to say that humans always err, that everything humans write has errors in it, if the argument is to work.

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Because it doesn't necessarily follow that just because humans can err, that humans always err, right?

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I can make errors, but does that necessarily mean that everything I have ever written is erroneous?

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It doesn't, just because I can make an error doesn't mean that I necessarily will make an error or always make an error.

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And God could prevent errors, and that is in fact exactly what Scripture says, and that is in fact exactly what we're arguing, that Scripture given by God is in its original autographs without error, and that God has preserved it as such.

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Also, we don't believe that the authors were inerrant, or that they never made mistakes, or that they didn't believe in some wrong things.

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Do you think that Paul and Peter and John and Isaiah and James and the other authors of Scripture, do you think that they might have believed some things that were wrong in their day or their time?

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They had to have, right? Of course they would have believed some things that were wrong. They probably would have believed some things that were wrong about reality, about nature, about humans, about people.

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They might have even believed some wrong doctrines on certain things. But when they wrote,

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God preserved any error that they believed about anything that they might have believed an error about from working its way into Scripture.

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That is how God preserved His Word. Because God's Word is inspired, it doesn't mean that the authors themselves were infallible, unable to err, nor does it mean that they knew everything, or that they had no wrong beliefs, but it does mean that when they wrote

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Scripture and when they were writing, that those wrong beliefs didn't have anything to do with what they wrote. They didn't work their way into what they wrote at all.

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Mike? In his writing.

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Yeah, that's an excellent way of turning the argument back on itself because there's a two -edged sword here.

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To err is human, the Bible has errors, therefore, sorry, to err is human, the Bible's written by humans, therefore the Bible has errors.

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Well, if to err is human, then the objector is also what? Human, if you're committing an error, and I can't believe anything that the

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Bible authors said because they were human and they could err, then I can't believe anything that you say because you're human and you can err, and therefore, your objections to inerrancy fall because you have just committed an error.

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So that's a good way of turning the argument back on them. It's a two -edged sword. Good, everybody catch that? That was a bit complex, but you got it?

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If you didn't get it, raise your hand. Okay, good. All right, here's the second objection. We only believe that the original autographs were inerrant.

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We cannot produce them or check our modern translations by the original, and therefore, we have no confidence that what we have today is inerrant.

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And this argument actually grants our premise, one of our premises, which is that we only do believe that the original autographs were inerrant.

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We don't claim inerrancy for any of the copies that were made of the original autographs. We don't.

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We're gonna talk about various textual variants that crept into the text as they were copied through the generations.

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We're gonna talk about that in a later session, but we only believe that the original autographs were inerrant, and so this is an objection that a

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Christian would make or somebody who's maybe trying to deny inerrancy who would claim to be a Christian, this is an objection that they might make.

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Look, inerrancy, we only claim that for the original autographs, and we can't produce them. We can't check our modern translations by the original.

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There's no museum that has Paul's original Romans in it. That doesn't exist. John's original Gospel of John is nowhere to be found.

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We don't have it. We don't have the original document of any New Testament or Old Testament book. We have none of them.

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And so the objection says that we only know that those were inerrant, but because we know that individual mistakes were made in some of the translation or some of the copies of those original manuscripts, and we can't test those against the original, therefore, we can't know for sure that what we have is inerrant.

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So this is a little bit of a different objection. It's a little bit stronger. Anybody have an idea of how you would answer that?

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Maybe wanna take a shot at it? Yeah, exactly right, and this gets to what we're gonna talk about later on, and this really is the key to it.

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Just because all we have, let's assume that all we have today are copies with errors in it.

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Does that mean that we cannot know what was originally written? I can guarantee you that if I were to take a copy of the

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Gospel of John and put it here in the middle of the room and say, I want everybody in this room to make a copy of the Gospel of John handwritten on a piece of paper, and that we had,

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I don't know how many people, there are 50 people here, and then we got to the end of that, it's okay, this copy, I'm gonna destroy this, throw this away.

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I can guarantee you that there would not be in this room one perfect copy of that Gospel. Somebody in there would make a mistake, a spelling mistake, a punctuation mistake, capitalization mistake, you would get word orders out, you might misalign, there's all kinds of mistakes you would make, but do you think that we could take all of the copies in this room of the

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Gospel of John, put them side by side, and figure out what the original said? Yeah, we would absolutely be able to do that with virtually 100 % certainty.

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So this objection fails in that way, and that was a very good answer to that. Because the question becomes of one of the original manuscript analysis, and that is, can we look at what we have and reconstruct the original, and in short, the answer to that is yes.

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We don't need to know what the original said in order to know that we have accurate copies of that, and you're gonna see that here in a few weeks, especially when we study chocolate chip recipes in chapter eight, but don't go ahead and look at that just yet.

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Objection number three, all right, here's objection number three. We know that we have certain errors in certain manuscripts that we possess today, like John 8,

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Mark 16, those are textual variants, and therefore, the originals contained errors. We know that we have certain errors in certain manuscripts that we possess today, and therefore, the originals contained errors.

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Now, this assumes another part of our argument to be true, and that is that what we have in copies, this is assuming that what we have in copies accurately represents the original.

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And so that's the assumption behind that, which we would affirm that, but then they're saying that since the copies that we have, we know they have mistakes in it, the original must have had errors in it as well.

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So then, John 8, we know that John 7, verse 53, through 8, verse 12, the

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Pricope Adultery, the passage there, is not in the earliest copies of John. It's not in some of the best

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Johannian manuscripts. That we have that passage that is floating around in individual manuscripts and even other places and in other

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Gospels, even in other places in the Gospel of John, I think, if memory serves me. You also have Mark 16, the long ending of Mark.

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The version that you have in your Bible is not the only ending to the Gospel of Mark. It's my personal opinion, we'll get into this in the weeks ahead, that that passage was added later, that Mark ended his

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Gospel in Mark, chapter 16, verse 8. So we know that we have these passages that are floating around.

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We know that you have these passages that have been sort of added into the text and inserted in some way. There's a little passage in 1 John called the

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Yohannian Comma Johannium. We know that they exist and so therefore, if we know that we have errors today, then the originals must have had errors if they've been faithfully copied.

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How does that argument break down? How would you answer that? Yeah, highlight the faulty logic.

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Yeah, that would be the logical argument that you'd need to make, but one of those premises is false.

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Yep. The condition of the copies does not reflect at all upon the condition of the originals. And actually, this is another example of an argument that cuts both directions.

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This objection is a double -edged sword because just as you cannot prove that the originals were without error, because remember, what they're saying is, let me see, how would

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I say this? We cannot prove that the originals were without error because we cannot find them.

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We cannot see them. We don't have them. So therefore, we cannot prove by looking at the originals that they had errors.

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But the fact that we don't have the original cuts against this objection as well because if you don't have the originals to compare manuscript copies to, then you can't prove that the originals had errors, right?

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If I can't prove that it's without errors for the reason that we don't have it, you can't prove that it had errors for the very same reason.

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So you have to assume something going into the argument. We simply have no reason to believe that what we have today is different from what was originally written.

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The presence of variations or changes, errors in translation, transcription does not mean that there were errors in the originals since inerrancy only applies to the original autographs.

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And again, we come back to the question that we had at the beginning of this is do we have reason to believe that what we have copied, that the copies that we have today accurately reflect what was originally written?

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Peter. Yeah. Yeah.

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All right, any other comments on that objection? This is kind of like,

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I think it's Bart Ehrman who makes the argument that, let's see, how does he present the argument?

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He says that we know that there are errors in the manuscript tradition today.

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This is Bart Ehrman's argument. We know that there are errors in the manuscripts that were copied from the originals. And so therefore, since there are errors in the copies, we can have no idea what the original actually said.

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Since we don't have the original, we have no idea what the original document said. Okay, so that's his argument.

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We have no idea what the original document said. The presence of errors demonstrates that. Now if we have, here's how it cuts back against Bart Ehrman.

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If we have no idea what the original document said, then how can you say that what we have today has errors in it?

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How do you know today that there is not one of these copies that is, in fact, an exact representation of the original?

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You can't prove that if you do not have the original to look at. So what he intends as an argument to cut against us, you don't have the original, therefore you can't know what it said.

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Cuts against his position. If you don't have the original, then you can't know that we don't know what it said.

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Right? You can't prove that we don't have original copy. We don't have a perfect copy of the original. So that cuts back against his argument as well.

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All right, the fourth objection, and this will be our final one, because this introduces us to the subject of infallibility.

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Somebody might say, I believe that infallibility refers to the truth of scripture statements while inerrancy refers to its facts and history.

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There may be inaccuracies in the facts and history, but never in the truth of the statements. Okay, so they will say, let me give you an illustration of this and it'll kind of make sense of that if it's kind of making your head go, what?

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Infallibility means it is unable to err. It's unable to err.

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Inerrancy says it is without error. So I may write something that is inerrant. Because I can write something that's inerrant, right?

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Two times two equals four. If I write that down, is that an errant statement or an errant statement? It's an inerrant statement.

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I can write things that are inerrant, they're without error. Just because I'm a human doesn't mean that everything I write has error, right?

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So I can write things that have errors in them. I can also write things that are without error. But it's an entirely different thing to say that I am unable to err.

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That's infallible. So inerrancy might describe what it is that I have written. It is without error. But infallibility is a bigger subject that says it is unable to err.

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So a newspaper article, a newspaper, well, you wouldn't say this in the Daily Bee, but you might read through the newspaper and say this newspaper contains no errors in it.

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It's a perfect proofreading job. This newspaper contains no errors in it. But does that mean that that newspaper is unable to err?

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That's infallibility. So that's the difference between infallibility and inerrancy. Infallibility is a bigger concept because then we're talking about its inability to do so.

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So somebody may object, and liberals did this in the early 1900s, somebody may object and say concerning the teachings of Scripture, the general principles that are taught, those are infallible.

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Those cannot err. But the statements in Scripture itself might be erroneous even though they might teach something that is unable to err, that is infallible.

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So they would do this with the creation account. They'd say you read through the creation account and here are the details that Moses got wrong.

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There was really no literal garden. There were no rivers. There was no tree of life. There's no first Adam and Eve. There's no literal fall.

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There was no talking serpent, et cetera. And all those errors are wrong. We don't need to look at the errors. The Bible contains all of those errors.

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But what it teaches that God created, that's infallible. That is without error. See how slippery that is?

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Now it's slippery because what they're doing is they're trying to say we can affirm that Scripture has errors in it while we affirm also that what

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Scripture teaches cannot have errors. The teaching is that God created man.

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That's the general teaching. That's without error. That can't really err because that's what the Bible teaches. Even though the statements that the

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Bible uses to communicate that teaching may have errors in them. It may be errant while what it teaches is infallible.

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Now this is trying to have your cake and eat it too. It's talking out of both sides of your mouth because it's confusing the subject of infallibility and inerrancy and it's kind of a twisted, a little bit of a twisted logic.

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Infallibility means something is incapable of erring. And so before I give you the answer to this or try and work through the answer to this, how would you answer that objection?

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And again, just to restate it, I believe that infallibility refers to the truth of Scripture statements. So the

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Scripture statements are the, yeah, while inerrancy refers to the facts and history.

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That should be, sorry, that objection should be I believe that infallibility refers to the truth of Scripture's teachings while inerrancy refers to the facts and history.

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I should change that. There may be inaccuracies in the facts and history of Scripture, but never in the truth of the

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Scripture's teachings. Let me have an idea of how you would, this is a bit more complex.

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Let me have an idea of how you would answer that, Brad. Oh, well, okay,

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I'll allow that. Yeah, that's a good way of saying it.

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They're trying to draw a distinction between facts and truth. They're also, it's also a, people, some

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Christians in some circles are real skittish about affirming the inerrancy of Scripture because they want to say that science teaches that the earth is billions of years old, that things come from nothing, that things evolved over time.

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They want to affirm all of these things that the world says are fashionably true and correct, and so they have a hard time standing on the truth of Scripture, but they don't want to deny that God created everything.

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They don't want to deny that God created man, so they want to affirm that. So they use infallibility to affirm the general teachings that we all want to affirm while allowing room to deny the explicit statements of Scripture that teach those teachings.

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Anybody want to take a stab at it, Jan? Yeah, yeah, so the foundational idea, she's saying the foundational idea is the statements themselves, which we're saying contain error, but then we're trying to build on top of that faulty foundation this other view that we have something that is without error in what it teaches.

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So the objection is basically saying Scripture has errors in what it says, but not in what it teaches. That would be the quick way of stating that.

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Yeah, Mike, right.

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Yeah, we looked at that earlier with the things that Jesus affirmed that were in the Old Testament, Jonah and the fish, creation,

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Adam and Eve, literal fall, all those things that they want to deny. Yeah, Christians in our day, because the winds are blowing so strongly in the world's favor, in the world's direction,

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Christians today really become skittish when people are forced to say, do you believe that Scripture's true in everything that it teaches, everything that it says and affirms?

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And so this is just a way that Christians, I would call them liberals, I would call them maybe well -intentioned,

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I don't know, but entirely misled. I think that they're trying to grease the skids and kind of get out from underneath of that pressure by saying we can affirm that Scripture has errors, but we would affirm everything

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Scripture says is true. And so the problem with that is we go back to what Jesus said in John 3. If I teach you earthly things and you don't believe those, how will you believe if I teach you heavenly things?

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If I cannot believe what Scripture says, why do I believe what Scripture teaches? That's a distinction that you cannot make.

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What Scripture says, the facts and history of the details are essential to what Scripture teaches. You can't separate them, just like you can't separate the doctrine of infallibility and inerrancy.

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If what Scripture teaches is infallible and cannot err, it cannot teach those things by using erroneous statements.

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You can't take lies, teach lies, and misstatements and wrong things and errors and arrive at the truth.

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You can't do that. All right, yeah, that brings us to the end of infallibility.

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So everybody understand the difference between inerrancy and infallibility? One means it's without error. One means it cannot err.

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And infallibility is the stronger word. It's the stronger word, which includes inerrancy. So if something is unable to err, that means, of course, that it will not err.

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It does not contain error. All right, any questions before we're done? That is our

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Sunday school hour. Yeah, Jeff, yeah.

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Yeah, that's another good point.

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If you are in a place where you're having to decide whether I believe something is an error or not, then that makes you the judge of it.

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And guess what? We talked about this earlier. We talked about plenary inspiration. It's good that you brought that up. Remember plenary? What does plenary mean? Does everybody remember?

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Everything, all of its parts, right? The individual statements as well as the teachings that it undergirds.

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So we say that God has inspired all of his words every last statement in Scripture. So the totality of it is inspired.

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And if we get to the point where we're trying to dissect what we think has error and what we think might not have error, usually what we end up being left with is us judging that the things that we don't like are the erroneous statements or the things that make us uncomfortable are the erroneous statements.

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The things that we really, really like that make us comfortable, feel good about ourselves, those are the ones that we think are infallible and inerrant.

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And that is always how it works out, always how it works out. All right, let's close in prayer and then we'll be done.

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Next week we'll do the preservation of Scripture. Father, we are, again, so grateful for your word and everything that we learn about it, everything that it teaches, affirms, its divine power and its divine gift to us.

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And we just would ask that you would, again, encourage our hearts in confidence in Scripture. May we trust it and love it and may we respond to it in obedience in a way that gives honor to it because of what it is and demonstrates our belief and our trust in your word.

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Make us confident to the end that we may never doubt or vacillate with the world and never compromise your truth of Scripture, but stand firm on what we believe and know to be true that you have revealed to us.