Beyond The Basics: The Bible

Well, I have a few things here, and we're going to kind of go through this really quickly because I want to do something else next week, but a few things happened this week.

Yesterday, we had a really great wedding, if you weren't here. We know Janet and I didn't get married again, but Jose and Damaris got married yesterday and that was a really good time.

I had a hard time keeping it together because it was the first time I'd married, I want to say this carefully, two

Christians who were not already married to each other. So it was fun for me, and I think we all had a good time.

But I had this week, I had a conversation with someone I hadn't spoken to in 15 years.

Facebook can be good for some things. And when we spoke on the phone, he said, well,

I understand through a mutual friend that you and another friend of mine have become priests or something.

That's what I did. I laughed and I said, well, that's pretty close. But a couple of days later, he sent me an email, and the title of the email said

Bible question. So I opened it up. It says, yeah,

Steve, seriously, I have a Bible question. Here are these two copies or two different editions of the

Tanakh. Anybody know what the Tanakh is? Brian?

Okay. The Bible the Hebrews use, called the

Tanakh, and it's also got, both these editions had commentary on them too, kind of like a study

Bible. And I just thought, what do

I care what copy of the Tanakh he gets? But I was looking at the two editions in Amazon .com,

and I just thought, you know what, because you can go on Amazon and you can kind of open up the book and kind of take a look at it.

And I thought, I'll just look at Genesis 1 .1. We all know Genesis 1 .1. So the

Tanakh says, in the beginning, both these editions, because one was an updated version of the other one.

Both of them said, in the beginning, it doesn't say in the beginning, it says, when

God began to create the heavens and the earth.

I'm like, I thought, maybe I'm missing something. And so I started going through my

Hebrew and I go, I don't really think so. You know, and so I don't like that.

And then I kept reading and I'm going, you know what, the rest of it is pretty much spot on. I said, the main thing is just continue reading it.

I said, but the issue is for you, not, you know, are you going to read the

Tanakh? It's what are you going to do about your sin? And he wrote back, obviously being

Jewish, and he said, well, I've been taught that while Jews may sin, we're not sinners.

So that's grounds for another conversation there. But I'm just like, I don't even understand, are you sacrificing animals?

What are you doing? You know, I mean, there has to be some standard for sin.

But I thought that was pretty interesting. Anyway, I want to talk about different books of the

Bible. And I'm not going to go through, I'm going to briefly scan through the first couple of things here. We all know where the word, or if you don't know, it's right there on your paper, where the word

Bible comes from. Canon, meaning measurements.

You know, how do books get in the Bible? And I was thinking about that this week. How do books get in the Bible? As some of you know,

I have a few books in my office. And Pastor Mike has a few more.

In fact, Jose, Jose's brother, who's an unbeliever, comes into my office just and he's just like, look at all those books.

Like he, you know, he just walked into a library or something like that. But I was talking to Jose yesterday, trying to keep him calm before the wedding.

So you talk about, you know, non -marriage stuff. And so he starts to ask me questions about commentaries.

And you know, what are the good ones? And I said, well, you know, you have to be careful. And I said, I don't really like to recommend a series.

It depends what you want it for. But in any series, there are going to be better commentaries than others.

It's just like I said, if you're studying one particular book, then I have an author that I want to propose to you as the guy.

And I said, I'll give you an example. I took exegesis of Ephesians in seminary. And I said, we had two commentaries that were assigned to us.

And the one I really liked is a guy named O 'Brien, because I'd be studying the text and I'd read O 'Brien and I'm going,

I think he's right. And then this other guy, his name's Lincoln. Brilliant man, absolutely brilliant.

But he spends like 20 pages of his commentary explaining why Paul didn't write the letter to the church at Ephesus.

And I would invite you to just open to Ephesians 1 .1 for a minute. And I'll get back to the canon. But I just want to read

Ephesians 1 .1. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are at Ephesus and who are faithful in Christ Jesus.

And in this entire epistle, we never get the idea that it's anyone other than Paul. There's lots of I stuff here.

And I think he even mentioned somewhere else his name. Maybe it's towards the end.

But in any event, the point is, if you have to spend 20, 30, 40 pages talking about why

Paul didn't write this when it says, I, Paul, well, then you really don't have much confidence in the

Bible, the issue of canonization.

The Roman Catholic Church says what about how books got into the Bible? Bruce. OK.

The Catholic Church decided which ones were of God and which ones weren't. Is there any problem with that theory?

The church is the ultimate arbiter of what should be in the canon and what's not. Is there another maybe historical little problem with that?

There was a canon before there was a Roman Catholic Church? An excellent point. Is there another historical problem with it?

An excellent point, because you're talking about the apocrypha. And they will say that these books are, perhaps,

Carmen was saying that they're not inspired, and that's true. That they don't claim that they're inspired on the same level, but they include them because they're helpful.

Yes. Hidden. It means hidden things.

But the interesting thing is, when did the apocrypha get added to the canon of scripture? After Luther.

Why? To back up the things.

They needed some kind of proof text for the traditions and for the teachings that they brought in that were unbiblical.

So you add what you need to justify what you're doing.

Canon, meaning measurements. These books were written by men, superintended by the Holy Spirit, inspired, as we often talk about.

It has a different meaning. I mean, when I grew up, in the charismatic church, people will talk about things being anointed.

Well, in the Mormon church, at least when I was growing up, everything was inspired. Everything was inspired.

It wasn't an inspiring talk. We didn't have sermons. We had talks, because they were never about a particular text.

They were about experiences. Wasn't that music inspiring? I was so inspired when

I went to the Grand Canyon. Inspiration, inspiration, which is... Inspiration is no more a feeling, at least biblical inspiration is no more a feeling than biblical love is a feeling.

Inspiration means God breathed out. Literally, it means breath.

You know, it's the idea, thea anustas, it's the breath of God. He breathed out, and these men, superintended by the

Holy Spirit, wrote down, using their personalities, exactly what God would have them write.

They were prophets, apostles, associates of apostles.

These are the men who wrote the Bible. Different categories there of books.

I like what MacArthur says about the Apocrypha, so let's look at that at the bottom of page one.

Not only does the Old Testament canon of Christ Day conform to the Old Testament, which has since been used throughout the centuries, but it does not contain the uninspired and spurious

Apocrypha, that group of 14 rogue writings, which were written after Malachi, and attached the

Old Testament, about 200 to 100 BCE, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, etc, etc.

And then they disappeared from the canon until Rome needed them later. But interesting.

And you know, another point to make about the canon of scripture is, even now, they're finding these books, different places, hiding in pottery in the

Middle East. And some people are saying, well, wait a minute, maybe we need to put those books in the

Bible. Maybe some of them need to be added. What I find amazing is that here we are, you know, after the earliest book written, we're probably 3 ,500 years after that.

No book... Good morning, Chris, how are you? No book has been shown to not belong, to not meet the standard, to be in contradiction with another book.

In other words, something happened when they formed this canon of scripture.

Something happened where the Bible could be considered inerrant, infallible. All the things that we apply, it doesn't mean it doesn't have an error, any error in it means that it's infallible.

It cannot make a mistake. How could that be if just a group of men got together and put it together?

What about these new books? Gospel of Thomas is the most common one that we should add to.

You know, people say, oh, who's the guy, a professor down at Duke or North Carolina or one of those?

Where is he? Anyway, he's talking about lost

Christianities and how we have to add these. His name escapes me at the moment, but he used to describe himself as an evangelical and now he's kind of an agnostic, basically atheist.

And people say, well, listen, so -and -so, what is his name? James White has debated him too. He debated him. What is it?

No, not Spong. Somebody will think of it.

Or he'll creep into my head sooner or later. But the

Gospel of Thomas, who knows anything about the Gospel of Thomas? Who has a copy of the

Gospel of Thomas in their Bible? Brian. Not written by Thomas, that's a small problem.

I mean, it's like probably, let's say, somewhere around 100 to 150 years after Thomas would have died, this book is written.

So, you know, like we have, we say, I don't know if you ever heard that a Supreme Court called government from beyond the grave.

I remember my high school history teacher used to call government from beyond the grave. But this would be like authorship beyond the grave, you know.

Thomas, the Gospel of Thomas. What else is a problem with the Gospel of Thomas?

Well, it's not a gospel. Other than that, it's pretty good. Not written by Thomas and not a gospel.

I've talked about this before, but one of the things that it says is that in order for, this is quoting

Jesus allegedly, that in order to get to heaven, a woman must become a man. I don't know how the ladies feel about that.

And given our current culture, maybe that's, you know, maybe that's why they want to add it. But it was a

Gnostic book. The Gnostics, I was just reading, I think yesterday, this whole idea of Gnosticism.

Not only does it mean knowledge or stem from the word knowledge, but the idea was that the physical world was bad.

It was evil. And again, I want to go back to Genesis 1, which

I should be able to find. Oh, yeah, there we are. You're good. Very good. Genesis 1, and as God creates everything, what do we hear over and over again?

In verse 18, and to govern the day and the night and to separate the light from the darkness, and God saw that it was good.

And then again, at the end of the chapter, he says, God saw that all that he made, or God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

God wasn't looking at his creation, the physical creation of the universe, and saying, boy, this is really evil.

It was good. This idea that there are missing Christianities, that Gnosticism is a branch of Christianity.

That there was a power struggle. I mean, like this was the Presbyterian and Baptist war of the first century.

You know, the big wrestling match for power. And that the

Gnostics lost out. When we compare what the Gnostic writings say to what the

Bible says, they're not competing religions any more than, or competing, let's change that.

They're not competing philosophies within the same umbrella.

It's not like, okay, conservative Baptists, Presbyterians, worship the same

Lord, believe generally the same things, except, you know, for baptizing babies, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, things that we could disagree on. They had a whole different mindset, a whole different way of thinking about the world, a whole different way of thinking about Christ, and a whole different way of salvation and sin.

How can those two things be considered the same? And the answer is, they can't.

They can't. There are no lost Christianities. If we look at the historical record, and we see that even today, nearly 2 ,000 years after the canon, and it would be probably, what, 1 ,900 years after the canon was complete, it still coheres.

It still goes together. There are no conflicts. The Bible has withstood the test of time.

We don't need to sort of do over on the Bible. There was something that happened when this canon came together, and it wasn't the church putting its stamp of approval on it that made it what it is today.

It was God sovereignly preserving exactly what he would have. There were some of the epistles that were not so favored during this whole process, but God kept in exactly what he wanted, and that's why we have what we have today.

I wanted to just spend a moment talking about the synoptic problem. Synoptic gospels are

Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and they're called the synoptic gospels because they're similar.

They cover a lot of the same territory, and sometimes they use even pretty similar words.

So you know what that means. Yeah, it must have been copied.

In fact, there are a lot of scholars today, you pick up their commentaries, and I mean, don't pick up their commentaries. It's so depressing to read commentaries these days, let me tell you.

You pick up their commentaries, and they will tell you that basically that Matthew and Luke were very poor students, failing, they were behind, and they just copied off Mark.

I mean, that's a simplification, but in essence, that's what they say. They go, listen, Mark, how do we know Mark was the first gospel written?

Because the experts say so. What do they base it on? Not on church tradition, because guess which gospel was written first?

Anybody know? Matthew. How do you know that? It was written in Armenian.

Thank you. No, no, that's... Yes, there's historical evidence for that.

The reason that it is the first book of the New Testament is because the early church believed it was the first gospel written.

And that was not challenged until really about after 1850, after a theory was born in the scientific world, that of evolution.

And what German theologians... You have to watch out for German theologians, not named Luther. What German theologians did was they looked at the synoptic gospels, and they said, wait a minute.

Mark is the shortest. It's the simplest. There are certainly overlapping themes.

And therefore, what must have happened is there must have either been a common source, which they called

Q, which means source. Quell in German means source.

There must be either a common source from which all three borrowed, or Luke and Matthew had access to Mark.

Therefore, Mark was written first. And that's why they talk about some of the same things and use similar language.

All that is just theory and speculation. What do we do with speculations, by the way? What's that?

I'm sorry, Brian. Toss them out the window. Why? Can anybody think of a

Bible verse that might deal with that? I'm sorry?

That's right where I'm going. Woo -hoo! 2 Corinthians 10 .3. Well, actually, yeah, 10 .3

through 5. You want to read that,

Bruce? Verse 5, that idea of the

New American Standard says, every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. This is exactly what it's talking about.

New theories, new ideas. You know, this idea that, I mean,

I don't know what else to say. If something is branded, I talked about this last Sunday night. If something is branded new, improved, never seen before, and it's attached to the

Bible, run. We have a new theory about the

Gospels. Mark went first, and then the other two somehow copied, or they had another source that they all copied from.

Brian said it well. Why would there be similar themes in some passages of the

Gospels? They witnessed the same thing.

I mean, when you talk to, you know, you hear this, and I've experienced it, three people see a traffic accident.

You talk to the three people, they'll all tell you the cars collided, but they'll describe it differently.

Why? Yeah, perspective. They're all different people. They all have different experiences.

So they'll watch the same event, and they'll emphasize different things. They may even have a different take on who caused the collision.

I don't know what that has to do with anything. But the point is, different people apply their perspectives, you know, their experience, everything else in a different way, and that's all these men did.

Matthew was written by, I see that hand. Will, and I'll get to it, was written by Matthew, very good.

And Matthew's source was himself. Mark was written by Mark, yeah,

John Mark. And his source was Peter, very good.

Luke was written by Luke. And what source did he have?

I think he had multiple sources, but I would say including the apostle Paul. OK, Will, you had a question.

Excellent question. And you raised two issues. Let me just address the first one quickly.

Is there any such thing as a non -born -again Christian? People like to consider themselves

Christians because they don't want to say that they absolutely don't believe in God, and they know they're not

Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, so they must be Christians. Second question is, does the

Bible contain errors? Well, I just got through saying it doesn't. So what do you do with someone who says the

Bible's just chock full, it's riddled with errors? Daniel, show me. It's generally the fault of the interpreter.

Why would that be? Well, they may not want to, but what does the

Bible tell us about unbelievers going to the Bible? They can't understand it. 1

Corinthians 2 talks about it, in verse 14, says that these things are spiritually appropriate

They're spiritually learned. An unspiritual person comes to the Bible, and it is a mystery novel.

They don't know who stabbed who with what, and what room it was in, if it was

Colonel Mustard or whatever. They don't have a clue. They're stuck. So what do you say to them,

Will? It doesn't contain errors is the correct answer. And I've mentioned this before, but I've had people post a whole list of errors, alleged errors.

And so I just looked at it, and I go, that's kind of ridiculous. So I cut and pasted those errors into Google, and guess what?

I not only found the page where the list of errors was posted, but I found a page that answered all those errors.

And I was like, perfect. That is absolutely perfect. He goes, well, you just Googled that.

I go, hey, takes one to know one. That's right.

That is right. Yeah, they certainly will not obey it. That's right. Yeah, I mean, what is that when you say the

Bible's full of errors? What is it really? It's an excuse. Brian's exactly right. It's an excuse.

I don't have to obey. I don't really have to worry about God. I can make up my own God, call myself a

Christian, do what I want, and in the end, I'll be fine because the Bible's full of errors. Brian?

Right. Well, why would they? Why would they give the benefit of the doubt? To themselves.

Well, if I've got to come down on one side or the other, I'm voting for me. Bible or me.

I'll take me. Thank you very much. Yeah. It's written by men, old men from thousands of years ago who were chauvinists.

You know, seriously, I always say, here's my best argument, logical argument. I mean, it's not a scriptural argument, and I don't like to use logical arguments, but I'm just like, you know what?

If men just got together and conspired to write down the Bible, you think they would at least make themselves look good?

I mean, if you were to sit down and write down, you know, just create a fictional thing, you know, with a God who didn't exist and just kind of go,

OK, what else can we write? You'd go, and I was so holy. I was such a good guy.

I never sinned against God. I did everything right all the time. And you know, maybe

God would make a mistake or two. That's not the Bible we see. That is not the

Bible we see. We see a Bible, whether it's Moses, whoever it is, where the men are constantly failing.

The best of men fail. Moses didn't get to go into the promised land. Why? Because he sinned.

Over and over and over again, men fail, and God is perfect.

That's not something men would do. I mean, if I was sitting down to write it, that's not what I would do. OK. Importance of scripture.

It's the only way we can know God. You know, I love Deuteronomy 29, 29. You know, and when the kids would start asking why questions,

I'd just go, Deuteronomy 29, 29. The secret things belong to dad. Well, let's look at Deuteronomy 29, 29.

Dad, why did you do? And see, it really didn't hurt him in the end, you know? All the abuse they had to take at my hands.

Terrible. What's really funny to me, by the way, just, you know, when they find themselves saying things.

I think Kristen was talking to me the other day, and she said, I found myself saying something in the car the other day.

And she goes, I sound like my dad. And it just made me laugh. Nobody else says that.

Not only my dad says it. OK, well, sad times. Who has Deuteronomy 29, 29?

So often we get, you know, we stop at the first part, just like I did. You know, the secret things belong to the

Lord. Secret things belong to dad. But really, the applicable part,

I mean, there are two applications here. The first part is, you know, there are things that we're not going to know. But I think it's fair to say that we cannot possibly comprehend everything to do with heaven.

Even if the Bible could describe it for us, I don't think we could fully comprehend it. I don't think we can fully comprehend the glory of God.

I don't think we can fully comprehend the sinfulness of man. We think we can. I don't think we really get how wicked, depraved, and sinful man is in comparison to holy

God. I don't think there's a comparison strong enough. There are a lot of things that we're never going to fully comprehend.

We don't know. Spoke about this a few weeks ago. We don't know when Jesus is coming back.

There are things that God alone knows. But this we can know.

The Bible, the things revealed, we have forever. Why? Well, so that we can have a really weighty book to kind of straighten out the warped books.

You know, I have some books that are warped in my office. And you know, the Bible is really good for straightening those things out.

No, it's so that we can know. So that we can know God, so that we can know his word, so that we can know ourselves and other men.

Want to just kind of skip down to number three there, psychology. Talk about this from time to time, but I think it's just important over and over again, because psychology so easily creeps in to page two, halfway down, the importance of scripture, which is number six.

And then subsection D, sola scriptura, Reformation principle, meaning scripture alone. That's how

Christians are to live their lives. When we talk about psychology, we're really talking about the meshing of human wisdom.

You know, what is a Christian psychologist? It's about the same, in my mind, as a non -born -again

Christian. I mean, can you be a Christian and a psychologist? I guess. I just don't know how you can reconcile those things.

I think, because ultimately, if you're going to put the teachings of Freud and Maslow and whoever else,

Skinner, any other names come to mind? I don't know, whoever, all these other, that's bad enough.

You're going to take all the teachings of these men and women and you're going to say, well, I'm somehow going to weave them into the

Bible, or I'm going to put the Bible on top of these principles. You're going to wind up, really, kind of with a mishmash of truth and error.

And Psalm 1, I think, would pretty much speak against that sort of thinking.

I mean, which is, let's put it this way. I think psychology can ultimately, and what it ultimately does, and turn to Psalm 1 while I'm talking, please.

What psychology ultimately says is, you need something other than the Bible for your problems.

God did not provide you with everything. Freud, Skinner, Maslow, I'm sorry, yeah,

Jung, let's see, who else, Oprah, everybody, Dr.

Phil, all this whirly wisdom, can they be right?

Yes. Right. And ultimately, that is the problem.

They'll say that you have a deficient value of yourself. You have some kind of syndrome.

You have whatever your issues are. And that's the problem, not sin.

You're not responsible for yourself. I remember true confessions.

Before I got saved, I did see a shrink. And given who

I am, who wouldn't have? But what do they do?

Mostly what they do is reflect back whatever you want. Whatever you want to hear is what you'll take away from those things.

I never went into a session, ever, and got beat up and just go, oh man, I've got to change my life.

It was always like, you're doing really good, just let me give you a hug. Or it was like, well, here are some things that you can do to probably make yourself feel better.

That's not the issue. That's not the issue. But Psalm 1, how blessed is the man, listen, who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.

Well, what is the counsel of the wicked? I mean,

I don't know what else you would call it. But those are perverse men.

Freud opened up his practice on Easter Sunday. And I mean, it's straight from the kind of God is dead, man is sufficient sort of view of the world.

Nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers. This is where you don't want to be.

But instead, rather, his delight is in the law of the

Lord. And in his law, he meditates day and night. That's where we need to be is in.

I mean, as we've said, I think, Mike, I think the very first Bible study

I ever went to is his. You know, if you're depressed, here's why you're depressed. Because your focus is on your problems.

Is anyone's life without problems? Life is hard. You know, and if you want to blame anybody, don't blame your mother and father, blame

Adam and Eve. You know, life is hard. It's going to be hard.

But if your focus is on your problems, it's going to be harder. Because that becomes a self -fulfilling problem.

It's like, get up in the morning, think about my problems. Go to bed at night, think about my problems.

Wake up the next day, think about my problems. I get calls from the office from people who say they're depressed.

My first question is what? No, my first question is, no, it's not even, have you read your

Bible today? No, it's not even that one. What's your problem?

What is your problem? What is your major malfunction? What's that?

Well, that's a good one. Who have you served last? That's close. My first question is, are you praying?

No, but that's a good one too. My first question is, are you working? Is that a surprising question?

The more time you have, the more you dwell on yourself. If you're not busy, you just think, it's just, it's me 24 -7.

You know, well, even in my dreams, I'm depressed. Well, no wonder, it's a total me world.

It's all about me. That's just not, that's just not right.

That's not the way we need to view the world. And I just don't understand why we would want to somehow see what we can borrow from a perverse system.

Our focus needs to be on Christ, not on our problems. The more we gaze at him and kind of glance at our problems, the fewer problems we'll have.

And certainly the less depressed we'll be. And I'm going to talk a little bit more on focusing on Christ later this morning.

Can there be new revelation, new books? I mean, the whole idea, we're out of time, but you know,

I have a couple more comments to make. The whole idea that there would be new books that we should add, you know,

God has spoken. We could go to Revelation 22 and people say that only applies to Revelation whatever.

I think the point is that certainly we would have no reason to think that God would need to add to his word after we had prophets, apostles, their associates, and the son of God himself walking on the earth.

What more is there to add? What else do we need to know? Finally, I just want to say a word about translations.

Someone has asked me yesterday about the ESV. I said,

I think it's fine. I think Pat Abendroth's church there in Omaha has gone to it as their kind of semi -official

Bible. I mean, it doesn't really bother me. There are some parts of it that I don't really care for.

In fact, let's just look at one real quick. And this is just a small thing, but this is just the kind of knucklehead thing

I am. Romans 1, Romans 1 verse 17. Does anybody have the

ESV? Tell the truth and shame the devil. Okay. Would you read Romans 1 17?

Okay. And the only thing I have is I'm just kind of a, you know, nutty preposition guy.

And I read that for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith.

And it just creates, I mean, for me, maybe, and I think I looked at this at one point,

I just don't understand that instead of the two faith, from faith to faith. I don't really understand the purpose of that.

But I mean, you know, generally speaking, I think the ESV is a very good translation. There are places I like it a lot better than the

New American Standard. So I think it's fine. In fact, the one thing

I really like about the ESV is I've been wanting for years for there to be one translation that conservative evangelicals,

I mean, you have to be careful about that word. So really conservative evangelicals could use just kind of, you know, and it wasn't the

NIV for me. And I explained why. I mean, the New American Standard, New King James, King James, ESV, all very good.

And basically are a word for word translation. The New King James and the

King James are based on newer texts. So there are some additional problems with them.

Those are called the Byzantine texts. What do I mean by a newer text? I mean that it's not as old as the older texts.

The Alexandrian family of texts, which is a couple centuries older. And so they're generally considered more accurate to the

Greek texts. But these days, it doesn't really much matter which Greek texts you use because they've done all this work and they've compiled all the

Greek texts into one work. And that's what we have. The NIV, kind of a second level

Bible. And I wrote here, it's a thought for thought translation.

What does that mean? It means there's less ambiguity. What do I mean by that? What they try to do with the

NIV is kind of smooth things out a little bit. Not make it so hard to read. In fact, somebody said it's like written in an eighth grade reading level.

But the problem is that sometimes it turns into a little bit more of a commentary than a strict translation.

For example, Hebrews 11 .11. Does anybody have NIV here this morning?

It's okay, really? Okay. Would you read the

NIV Hebrews 11 .11, please? Okay, now could everybody hear that?

By faith, Abraham. What was the rest of it? By faith,

Abraham? Okay.

Anybody have anything different than that? Virtually every hand should be up in the air right now because every other translation says by faith, even

Sarah herself received ability to conceive even beyond the proper time of life since she considered him faithful who had promised.

And the reason I bring that up is just because you can look at the Greek text and even if you don't know

Greek, if you look for something that looks like Abraham and then you look for something that looks like Sarah, you will not see the word

Abraham anywhere in verse 11. And so I'm like, I don't even know why they did that.

It doesn't make any sense. But sometimes they just kind of, it tends toward a little bit more, and there are places in the

NIV that are actually, again, better than the NAS. So it's kind of a matter of what you're comfortable with.

That's just the most glaring example I could think of in terms of translation. Does that mean the Bible's not true?

No. It just means that sometimes translators don't always choose the best. What does the

New Living Bible say? See, and again, the word

Abraham is in the Greek text. That's why it's not in the New American Standard or the New King James or the

King James or the ESV. It's just not there. Now, talking about the third tier of Bibles that are really more like, are they terrible to read?

No. But the New Living Translation, Message, Amplified, and then

I put the NWT. Those are really more commentaries than they are the actual Bible.

And then you have the New World Translation. I should have created a fourth tier, but I would have run out of paper. That would be the

New World Translation, which is not, it's not a translation at all. It is a theological document.

You know, when in doubt, destroy the text. And that's what they've done there. So if you have, you know, any one of those top five, if you're comfortable with the

NIV, I'm not gonna try to change you. Just understand that their goal was to make it readable, not to perhaps make it as precise.

They wanna keep it accurate, but it didn't have to be as precise. And sometimes that makes, quite frankly, the King James or the

New King James or the ESV or the New American Standard sound a little bit wooden and disjointed.

It doesn't have a nice flow. So it's just a matter of how much ambiguity you want.

But I would encourage anybody who has a living, New Living Translation message amplified, and that's what you typically study with,

I would encourage you to step your game up. All right, well, let's go ahead and close in prayer.

And by the way, before I do that, let me just say that we're gonna be starting a series of different things.

I've got, I'm gonna be talking about heaven and hell and a lot of other different issues.

And if there's something in particular you would like to talk about at Sunday School, well, send me an email and we'll schedule that.

So let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for your word.

We thank you that it is sufficient. We thank you that you have preserved it against all manner of attacks, even from within the walls of Christendom.

We thank you that you have enabled us to have our own copy in this day and age. What a blessing that is.

Lord, we thank you most of all for sending your Son, Jesus Christ, without whose sacrifice being applied to us through the

Holy Spirit, we would never understand it. Without the work of the

Spirit, we could not understand your word and we praise you. Thank you that you have enabled us to do so. Lord, would you bless the rest of our day here in Christ's name, amen.