Reliability of the New Testament-Session 1

And, there we go, and so, so far on this trip already, I have experienced temperatures significantly lower than Phoenix has ever experienced in its entire recorded history. And two days ago I woke up in Oklahoma, someplace outside of Oklahoma City.

I don't fly anymore. I am driving in a, I have a fifth wheel, and my truck is right outside here, and so that's how I get around these days. And I woke up with snow everywhere, and I have never, any RVers, anybody who's done some RVing?

A couple, wow, all the rest of you are like, nope, have no interest in it. We prefer hotels and stuff like that, okay, fine. Well, you have to break down, you have to disconnect all your stuff and put all your stuff away.

And so that was the first time I had ever done that in the snow before. And then I'm parked out next to a lake out here in St. Peter's, and the wind is whipping off this huge ice cube. And so it's, and that just cuts straight through you, I'm going to tell you something, that's great.

So I'm really thankful, those of you who have been here before know that I like to bring my Coogees with me, this time they are functional, very functional. And this is a cashmere Coogee, ever worn a cashmere sweater?

It is incredibly warm, I may melt before we get done tonight. But you put this under a nice jacket like that, and at least from here to here, I'll live, the rest of me is going to just freeze up and fall off.

So I got an email from the seminary, since I was here last, we missed 2021, just barely sort of. I was supposed to be here the first week in December, we had to follow wisdom and delay that for a little bit.

But since I was here last, I have now taken a position as the Professor of Church History and Apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary down in Conway. You may have heard of Jeffrey Johnson, Owen Strand, Scott Anial, are some of the people on staff down there in Conway now.

And so I'm going to be heading down there, and the seminary sent me an email this morning that they know that I'm driving in and I'm staying in my unit, in my fifth wheel. And they sent me a thing and said, we're sure you're following the weather developments, which in the middle of the United States is, well, that'll change in five minutes.

How can you even predict it? But said, we're expecting single digits in Conway for the low on Thursday when you get here. Are you going to be okay? It's like, well, actually, the Lord was really good to us.

We had no idea what we were doing when we started getting into this. And somehow, we ended up getting a unit that has the Arctic 4 insulation package on it. And so it's actually working pretty well for me.

And so it's good to be with you. Hey, Van, how you doing there, bro? All right. Good to see you. Good to see you. We missed a year, but we're just going to consider this for December of 2021. Is that all right?

I don't want to mess everything up. And I keep telling Ken, I said, look, I can even get you a new speaker. I mean, he's brilliant. You need something. I mean, you are such a creature of habit, but we need to break this habit.

You need to find a younger man. I'm getting old. Okay. I'm going to hook you up with Jason Lyle for December, and you'll see, there you go. A lot of you are going, yeah, let's do it. And I can do that.

Jason's a good friend. I'm sorry? You both can come. Well, no, no, no, no. Jason Lyle is probably the most intelligent man I've ever met. His IQ is so far beyond mine that it would make me look really stupid.

So no, we don't, we don't, I don't want to be on the same stage because then I'll look really bad. So anyways, no, seriously, it's good to be back here. This is sort of the first weekend of a extended trip.

Like I said, I'll be teaching in Conway next week, and the weekend after that I'm debating a subject that I'm sure all of you are going to be driving all the way down to Houston to attend the debate on middle knowledge, I mean, because everyone's talking about middle knowledge, right?

I mean, I'm sure most of you over dinner were having discussions about middle knowledge. You were? Yeah, see? There you go. And yeah, there are a few people that are really interested in that subject, but not too many.

But we're going to be having a debate down there the weekend after that, and I don't get home until the 15th of February. And my wife was probably, was probably looking, I think my wife probably is enjoying that I'm gone right now, but we're moving her mother into a new home two days later, so she wants me home.

So that's sort of my deadline to get back. So prayers for traveling mercies in the cold would be, would be great. I appreciate that. So far, so good. So this evening, you know, when you, when you look at the subject of the Windows splash screen, that's, that's nice.

I don't know if I can handle that personally, because I'm a Mac guy, so that just sort of feels, besides that, Bill Gates is behind this, so I, let's, let's, which means he's probably listening to everything that we're saying right now, so we'll have to, have to throw the, the splash screen back up there for the conference.

Why New Testament Reliability Matters in a Secular Age

I have presented on the subject of New Testament reliability, the transmission of the text of Scripture for decades, literally, and it's fascinating for me, I was thinking about this before we, we came here, it's fascinating to think about the fact that what has happened over the past couple of years has provided us, in a sense, a new perspective.

It's forcing us to approach this subject, it's not like the subject itself has changed, but its importance for us as Christian people, it has changed. How so? Well, even before COVID hit, and even before all the lockdowns and the fundamental change of society, there were things happening that were demonstrating to many of us that there were many Christians who spoke of, would even use terms like inerrancy, which outside the United States, in places like Europe, is almost a sign of your backwoods hickiness, in essence, to believe something like that.

But there were people who would, back in, you know, I'd speak at conferences, I'm thinking of one man, I spoke at a conference with him in 2008, and there would have been no thought in my mind about major differences between us on key fundamental issues.

But starting in about 2018, I began seeing, and I was a little bit slow, I was slow to get to it, many other people saw it long before I did, I started seeing major movements, not only on the part of individuals, but entire organizations, and of course, some organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention are in grave danger of major splits.

There are people, there are churches already leaving over many of these issues, and they reflected on the nature of Scripture, its normative place in Christian theology. Not so much its transmission over time, but whether it has ever intended, was ever intended by God to be sufficient as the source for the church to go to, to understand God's purposes for the church at all.

And it was becoming very clear that there were many people who were adopting the idea that while Scripture can provide an external normative framework, that when it comes to the actual application, the idea of Scriptural sufficiency was being sacrificed.

Now, thinking through sufficiency is vital for every single generation. I don't care if you were living in the days of, well, let's think about it this way. What if you were living, okay, let's do a quick church history quiz here.

How many of you feel very, very, very, very, very confident that you would be able to answer the one question that I always say will be on the final exam of any church history test that I give, and that is the date, only to the year, the date of the Council of Nicaea.

How many of you know when the Council of Nicaea was? You are very confident. Okay, all right. That was about a quarter to a third of our audience. So, what was it? Impatient, aren't we? That's about a quarter or a third of the audience.

And so, when the time comes for the final, just remember, write it down, that the Council of Nicaea was in A .D. 325, 325 A .D. is when the Council, oh, you had said you knew? Oh, see, some of you were putting your hands up, you were sort of guessing, but I should have called on a few people to see how that worked.

Let's say you lived in 325, and the Council of Nicaea is one of the greatest turning points in Christian history. Why? Because only 12 years earlier, Christian persecution ended in the Roman Empire. And, so from 303 to 313 was the period of the most severe persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire.

It was full out, all out, from one end to the other, track the Christians down, and if they will not sacrifice the emperor, you kill them. It was a very, very bloody and difficult ten years. Many, many, many people died.

So, only 12 years, well, we'll take questions later on, so only 12 years later, the emperor calls a council of the church. That's fast. Twelve years earlier, the emperor was the greatest enemy of the church.

Twelve years earlier, you were willing to die to not say, Kaiser Curios, Caesar is Lord. Because you say, Jesus Curios, Jesus is Lord. And many have died before you. And so the Caesar was considered to be the, the Antichrist, the very person opposing the Christian faith.

And now in only 12 years, not only does he call this council, but he's in attendance. And he's claiming to be a Christian. Now, why call a council? Why would you even call the very first, what's called ecumenical council, worldwide council, of the Christian church?

Because there was a great debate raging. And the debate was, is Jesus truly God, or is he like God, but a creature? Now, immediately, the question that I would have for all of you to think about is, is the Bible sufficient to answer that question?

And there were obviously some in that day that made the argument that no, it really isn't, that wasn't its intention. And if you're familiar with the solution of the church at that time, the terminology that was adopted by the Council of Nicaea was not biblical terminology.

Because the Arians, the people who were following Arius, who said that Jesus, there was a time when the Son did not exist. The Son is an exalted creature. The Son is the greatest of all of God's creations, but He is not truly God in and of Himself.

Arius could come up with a way of explaining any text of Scripture. And if you've ever met with a sharp Jehovah's Witness, you know that that's pretty much what they can do too. And so that makes you think about the sufficiency of Scripture, because the only way to detect an Arian was to use a term that was not derived from Scripture, but the defenders of this approach would say it is necessitated by Scripture.

And so if you're familiar with the history of this particular council, you know that the term was homoousios, of the same substance, confessing that you can't divide up the substance of God and you can't have Jesus being a God, or a sort of God, or heteroousios, of a different substance than the Father, or even homoousios, of a similar substance.

No, the only way to actually be able to go, ah, you're an Arian, was to use a term that they simply could not affirm. And that was homoousios. And so we immediately have to start thinking, okay, so if we believe in sola Scriptura, Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith of the Church, it's because it's the only thing that we have that's God-breathed.

It's what God has breathed out and revealed. And we believe in tota Scriptura, all of Scripture, you don't get to just do the red letters, or the books you happen to like, and you have to skip over the genealogies, and a couple of them, you know, judges and stuff, that's some creepy stuff in there, see?

And so, you know, the way that most people handle the Bible. If you believe that it's sola Scriptura and tota Scriptura, then you have to take everything that the Scripture teaches, and when you do that, you realize that the Scriptures are teaching that Jesus is identified as Yahweh, He is Yahweh come in human flesh, He is the creator of all things, He's eternal, and that is the foundation then of using non-biblical terminology such as homoousius to detect people who are fundamentally denying certain elements of biblical revelation.

So the Scriptures remain sufficient, but you have to apply them when challenges come up to the Church, and that's really been what a lot of the history of the Church has been about. And that is, when you bring the Gospel out into the world, it's one thing to bring that Gospel into the Jewish world of the first century, but very quickly you're now having to, Paul is going to Athens and meeting with Greek philosophers, and they're going to be asking very different questions than the people in the synagogue in Capernaum were asking about who Jesus was.

And so there is a need to take that Scripture and that Scriptural truth, and to express that in a way that people will be able to understand what it is that is revealed in Scripture itself. Now obviously in the process of that, as early as the second century, immediately questions about, well, what was originally written came to the fore.

So if you've read any of the early church authors, and I encourage you to look into, you don't have to read everything, I mean we obviously don't have a large portion of what was written in the ancient world.

We have fragments of what has come down to us, certainly we have complete works from certain people, but in almost any of the early church fathers there's things they wrote that we don't have, and sometimes all we have is fragmentary records of what they did.

But it's always good to know where we came from, and I think there are some people, I was certainly raised in a venue, not a venue, a range of evangelical Christianity that did not have a great respect for the people that came before us.

But when you do read some of them, you read someone like Justin Martyr. And Justin Martyr, of course that was not the name his mom gave him. Just think that one through a second, you'll get it. It's late in the evening, he just had something to eat, but that's the name that history would give him because he was a martyr for the faith.

But he was a philosopher who was converted to Christ. Throughout his entire life he continued to wear the pallium, the cloak of the philosopher, even as a Christian. And he had an extensive dialogue with a Jewish man by the name of Trifo, Trifo the Jew.

And when Justin would seek to show Trifo where the scriptures prophesied the coming of Jesus, this is where we start running into Trifo saying, you Christians have changed that. That's not what we have in our Hebrew.

And immediately you start seeing that, well the early church was primarily using the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And there are numerous differences between the Greek translation and the Hebrew text of the scriptures.

And so this has always been an issue that every generation has struggled with. And up until the modern period, that was viewed very differently than we view it today. Because you see, you can be born and raised in a Christian church today, and there are certain churches where everybody uses the same English translation of the Bible.

And so you've never encountered a difference. Now today everybody's got one of these things, and there's 47 different English translations on here, and so it's sort of hard to avoid that. But for a long time a lot of us were just like, well this is just the Bible, this is simply what I've been given.

And up until this modern period, the vast majority of Christians, A, never owned a Bible. I mean, you look at some of the full Bibles that we've found, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, those things would have cost, in modern money, thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to produce.

So the vast majority of Christians didn't have that kind of money. And so their exposure to the Scriptures was in church, was hearing the Scriptures read. And so the freedom you have to access the Scriptures and to read the Scriptures in that way is a relatively modern thing.

And then to have such uniformity. Because up until Gutenberg prints the Bible in 1453, and of course even then it's going to take hundreds of years before you start getting really mass-produced Bibles available to a large number of people, you would have manuscripts and they would be handwritten and they would only be of a certain part of the Bible.

And that's how everybody got along. And so all of that to shine some light on the fact that as we approach this subject in 2022, we are coming into a time period where there are many Christians who are saying that the Bible is insufficient outside of adopting a particular interpretive matrix that will allow it to speak to a hyper-secularized society.

And others are saying that matrix of interpretation needs to be derived from certain sources outside of Scripture. Now we've done twice, I think now, over the past number of years when I've come here, we have addressed critical theory and issues along those lines, and I'm not getting into that this time around, but it is an important thing to realize that the debates that we had only a few years ago would sound very incomplete in 2022.

Because we wouldn't be addressing all this new stuff, and I think for a lot of Christians that makes us feel a little imbalanced. It's like, how could things have changed so quickly? And now, I was just sort of starting to feel comfortable with that, I had some idea of how we got the New Testament, but now there's all these new questions that are being asked about whether we should reject, for example, the formation of the canon, because there were inappropriate authority structures, power structures, everything's power and oppression today, right?

There were inappropriate power structures that were involved in the selection of the books of the canon, and maybe that should be reopened, and all sorts of stuff like this. And when we encounter that kind of stuff, it leaves us probably a little bit hesitant to be as bold in raising the witness of Scripture as we should be.

And we all know, in most situations, there's a small opening that will happen in a conversation, and the thought crosses your mind, you know, I could go through that door, he's just said something, and without twisting his words or anything like that, I could really move into a presentation of the Gospel and Christ's authority in this situation, and so on and so forth.

But if there's a hesitation on our part, very frequently that door slams shut. And my concern would be that we hesitate because there are just so many voices saying, that's not enough, that book's not enough, you need to have all these other things going along with it.

And so, you combine that with the fact that we now live in such a massively secular age. For me, I was just thinking, I was in my late 30s the first time I came here, and that seems like a very, very long time ago now, especially since my youngest child just turned 33.

So it has been a long time. And I feel this massive gap between me and what's called the Z-Gen, or whatever you call it, the 18 to 24-year-olds, because I was raised in a very, very, very, very different time with very different assumptions and presuppositions.

And when it came to the text of Scripture, there was a general respect for the Bible in the 1960s, and if you weren't around, you'll have to take my word for it. Sure, there were many people who were already rejecting it and weren't living in light of it, but it wasn't the kind of wholesale embracing of a secular worldview that we now have, which would literally put us in the situation today where you have a man who competes in swimming on the collegiate level, and then decides he's a woman, and starts competing with the women, and the culture goes, that's a good thing.

And it's wonderful that she is winning all of these races, and this is great. And if her teammates don't like it, and someone from my era is going, what is going on here? How can this be? And yet there are people in that generation that that's just what they've been raised with.

That's the whole worldview. And a part of that worldview is a fundamental skepticism, a fundamental skepticism, about any claim to supernatural revelation, and any claim to objective truth. Everything is subjective truth now.

I mean, if that guy who thinks he's a gal experiences that feeling, well that becomes that person's truth, and we are all supposed to somehow adopt ourselves and adapt ourselves to that person's truth.

I'm not sure how any of that works, to be perfectly honest with you. But that's where they're coming from. And so when we come to someone and say, well there's actually this truth from God, and it has been passed down from generation to generation, and it goes all the way back to the time of Christ, many in the secular mind, that actually, instead of being a good thing, is a negative thing.

It's rooted in the bad times, in the times of darkness. And you see, now we've had the Enlightenment, even if they don't know what that actually involved. Now we've had the Enlightenment, and that's why you see people who are willing to fundamentally destroy our own history, and get rid of what actually happened in our own nation, on the idea that we don't want to offend anybody.

As if what happened in history didn't happen in history. I don't know that I've ever seen a generation that has less desire to be connected to the generations that came before it, than the young generation now.

And what's frightening about that, I think most of you who have become adults have started thinking these things through. Having your first child helps you start thinking about this. Believe you me, having grandchildren really makes you think about this.

When you don't look back, and see yourself in light of all those who have come before you, and realize they were just like you, and hence seek to judge them with some type of grace that you'd want to have extended toward yourself.

Those same people do not look forward to the next generations, and feel any responsibility to work toward the betterment of their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And when you think about it, I don't care what your politics are, over the past two years, your great-grandchildren have been indebted, and turned into indentured servants.

And most people don't give a slightest care, because we don't think about anything other than our own 401k, our own retirement, and our own feelings of accomplishment. And a society that falls into that trap is in grave, grave danger.

But what it reflects is an attitude that Christians should not have. Speaking to Christians, have you read our Bibles? How often does the Bible direct us to think back to God's faithfulness in the past?

Point us to those who experienced God's faithfulness. I mentioned today, I did a dividing line from the unit, and you know, what does Joseph do? What do a number of the patriarchs do? They put up piles of stones.

And we all sing the hymn, and I've made sure you all know. The second stanza, Here I raise my... Can someone say it right? Evan Eitzer. Evan Eitzer. It's a Hebrew phrase. Evan is stone. Eitzer, help. Stone of help.

It's a memorial that you put up. Here I raise my Evan Eitzer. Hither by thy help I'm come. Right? So that was referring back to that practice where you would put up a pillar, and this is where God met me.

This is where God met my need. And it's something that's real, and it's there in history, and you can come back to it and remember what God did for you. And then your future generations have that same testimony.

And we see that in Scripture all the time. Even when Paul writes to the Corinthians, and he starts warning them, Don't be like the Israelites who did this, this, and this. Right? And then he says, These things were written for our benefit.

This is why this is recorded in Scripture for us. Look back and learn, and be warned, because very often they really, really messed up. So we're supposed to be recognizing that we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves, and we're living in a day where you are the biggest thing there is.

You are autonomous. What happens between here and here is all that matters. And everybody else is even supposed to learn, this is the most arrogant, childish thing I've ever seen, but everyone else is supposed to learn your pronouns.

What? What? I can see a four-year-old doing that. Seriously. But I, I, I, you're being mean. No, I'm not. I'm simply telling you the truth. There is no society that can survive when you basically freeze everybody at the mental and emotional maturity of a four-year-old.

That's what we've got in universities today.

If you need a safe space because somebody offended you, that's not maturity.

That's immaturity. And four-year-olds are fairly easy to control. That's the whole point. And they are not thinking about their futures. Four-year-olds are not planning for their university education, and that's because you get focused solely upon yourself.

So, that sermon was for anybody who needed it. The point being that when you talk to this generation and you start talking about the claims of Christ, and they start asking you, well, you know, why should I believe that?

Well, we have this revelation from God. Where did that come from? Well, in its youngest parts, it's 2 ,000 years old, almost 2 ,000 years old. And its oldest parts, a good 3 ,400 years old. For them, that's an automatic disqualifier.

For my generation, that was like, wow. Wow, that goes back. That means people have believed these things and have honored these things. And yeah, that's value. Now, it's like, you mean it wasn't written on an iPad?

Who cares? I mean, so some Neolithic people wrote something down on a rock someplace. Why should I care? If they didn't know about DNA, what does it matter? And why should it matter to me? That's really where many people are today, because they really believe they are in a position to judge whatever is presented to them as if they are the very center of all of human knowledge.

And so that massive change in epistemology, we used to call it postmodernism, but really it's the embracing of the secular worldview that says there is no transcendent, there is nothing beyond the material.

Now, a lot of people are rebelling against that. That's why you've got all the New Age stuff and stuff like that. But most people recognize that even that is not being asserted as being seriously true.

It's just, I don't like the cold, sterile scientism out there, and so I'm going to do something spiritual in the process. That's where that's coming from. But secularism, and I've been saying this a lot recently, and I've had no one dispute this.

They may not like it, but they don't dispute it. Secularism is the greatest denial of everything Christ taught, everything Christ said, everything Christ lived and died for that has ever appeared amongst the children of men.

Even the pagan religions had gods. Even they recognized some kind of transcendent value to something. But secularism is a fundamental evacuation of everything that makes humanity special. What's special about humanity in a secular worldview?

Nothing. You're made up of DNA, and so are chimps and dogs and shrimps and snails and everything else, and you're not special. You just happen to be a certain spectrum, and that's why you can't be a speciesist.

I remember the first time I heard someone say speciesist. I was like, what? But now it's all over the place. You can't think your species is better than another species, you see, as they're munching on their McDonald's cheeseburger.

But that secular worldview evacuates all meaning out of not only the human existence, but also any reason for you to be concerned about what came before and what will come after. And as we try to seek to honor Christ by proclaiming His truth, every generation has been called to express that truth in such a way that it communicates.

Now, don't get me wrong. Some of you are sitting there saying, wow, that sounds like we don't really have any way of... We don't have a point of connection with someone who has been thoroughly secularized.

They have been... You know, when I was younger, we were still running on the momentum of a Christian worldview, and it would still be in even the public education system. And when I graduated in 1981, I got to give a talk when I graduated, and I remember even then some discomfort about the fact that I wanted to make reference to my Christian faith in my valedictorian address at my high school.

And that was 1981. Today, the resistance to saying the things that I said would be overwhelming. I simply wouldn't be allowed to say those types of things, at least in a secular context. So we were...

There's been a transition over time. And so there were still people who were influenced by the Christian worldview. We now have a generation coming up that is thoroughly secular. Their parents were secular.

They are secular. And so they are acting as secular man. And secular man is in fundamental rebellion against his creator. His entire way of thinking is an act of rebellion against his creator. And so you no longer have any kind of latent respect for the Christian scriptures.

The vast majority of the people graduating from public education institutions, they have no earthly idea how central this was to the founding of this nation and to the entire concept of law in the West.

They have no idea. Sadly, most Christians don't realize. Are you thankful for the American legal principle, when it's actually followed, innocent until proven guilty? You know where that comes from? The Bible.

Are you thankful that you have the opportunity of cross-examining witnesses against you in a court of law? Where did that come from? In the Bible. Our legal system was based upon the view of man as God's creature.

And the legal foundations came straight from the page of Scripture. And you can go back to the early... I can guarantee you President Biden's selection for the Supreme Court will not do this. But you can go back to the early Supreme Court decisions.

And you know one of the sources that they would cite very frequently in their Supreme Court decisions? It's called the Bible. That would be enough to get a decision overthrown today. A violation of church and state.

They didn't think so and they wrote the thing. But that's where we are today. So, bring all that back to where we're supposed to be. Alright. So I have here my... for those of you who don't know who he is... my Jeffrey Rice rebind.

See those are... the people that are chuckling are the people who wish they had one. Are there any other Jeffrey Rice rebinds in the room? Anyone? None? Really? That's so sad. I have two of them. And those are just a couple of them that I've got.

I didn't want to bring the others and just, you know, make you feel really bad. What are you talking about? Jeffrey Rice does some of the most awesome Bible rebinding. I mean, the leather and... that's a smell that just makes you smile and makes all the problems in the world go away.

This is actually a 1977 New American Standard Bible that I bought probably about 81 or so. And it's a nice large print. That's why I like it because I can still read it. But I had him... I sent it to him and he rebounded it for me.

And this is my Tyndale House Greek New Testament that he did for me as well, which is a very, very interesting Greek New Testament. We'll talk a little bit more about this particular edition later on.

But... you open this to someone today, and aside from all the worldview issues that we were just talking about, if they have come through the public educational system, there is a very, very, very large chance that they have been told that this book has been fundamentally altered since it was originally written and no one could possibly know what it originally said.

So, 40 years ago, the default would be I will accept what it says as being an accurate representation of what the Bible has always said. Now today, you're going to have to prove to me that it has not been changed over time.

And even then, then you're going to have to overcome my prejudice against something that is ancient, because if it's ancient, then it's not following the science and therefore should not really be given much in the way of authority.

Whenever that happens, the funny thing is, if you were sitting there watching TV, you just reach over, but when you're in a room like this, you hit every button but the button you want to hit. Isn't that right?

Isn't that right? It's because your heart rate has gone up 80 beats per minute, and every button is the wrong button. That's the volume increase! Oh no! It's okay. But the worst thing is when you're sitting on the front row.

That's the rough part. But I've done the exact same thing. I've been up here preaching, going, okay, we forgot to turn that one off. Alright, sorry about that. So, there you go. We live with these things.

I've always wondered, what would Spurgeon have done? How would Spurgeon? Because I have actually preached in the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. That was quite an experience. And by the way, just in passing, there is, I guess, I never found it, but Spurgeon taught that you should never preach more than 40 minutes.

Now, when I was at Phoenix Performing Baptist Church, I would normally do about 45 minutes. Now that I am a pastor at Apologia Church, I have been ruined by my fellow pastor, Jeff Durbin. And I can, an hour five is fast for me now.

That's just all there is to it. But, if you preach at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, embedded in the pulpit is a 40 minute clock. It's a 40 minute clock. It's right there. And Dr. Masters, who I believe is still there, when he introduces you, and you step forward, as he leaves, he turns it on.

And so, the first time that I did that, I honestly, I sort of stood there and sort of went, I don't feel a trap door down there. Feels pretty solid. I think I'm okay. I don't know. But you got done. I actually attended once when I wasn't speaking.

And he was at the end of the Book of Acts. And about 38 minutes in, he apologized and said, we only have two verses left. I need to, you know, we can't do a whole other sermon for the last two verses.

I think he went 42 and a half minutes. And Spurgeon rolled over in his grave. And that was the end of that. So, how did I get on to the Metropolitan Tabernacle? I have no earthly idea. So, anyway, oh, see what you did?

I lost five minutes right there because I was going, I wonder what Spurgeon would do if right in the middle of one of those awesome points he was making, Dixie started playing or something like that. Something tells me he would have had very large bearded men at the gates, at the doors, taking everyone with them, every phone out.

And that's probably what would have happened at the Met Tab. Anyway, so, we have more hurdles to overcome than my grandparents did. Because my grandparents could simply quote from the Bible and for the vast majority of people in our society that was considered to be an authoritative word and there you go.

So, we now have multiple barriers. It's not just any longer, well, I read a book by Bart Ehrman that said that this has been edited and changed and we really don't know what it originally said. That's one big barrier that for a lot of Christians is the end of the conversation.

Because we admit that we either grew up in the faith or we entered into the faith without really getting the whole story as to where the Bible came from and why we can trust it. But now beyond that we now have and even if it is accurate why should I care about it because it came from generations and generations and generations and generations ago and those people didn't know the things that we know.