The Inerrancy of Scripture Part 1

James's Background and the Conference Theme

I'm just going to quickly read a short introduction of James before James comes up. James is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.

He is a professor having taught Greek, systematic theology and various topics in the field of apologetics. He has authored or contributed to more than 24 books including The King James Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom and The God Who Justifies.

He is an accomplished debater having engaged in more than 140 moderated public debates around the world with leading proponents of Roman Catholicism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormonism as well as critics such as Bart Eham, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong.

In recent years, James has debated in such locations as Sydney, Australia as well as mosques in Toronto, London and South Africa. He is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church and has been married to Kelly for more than 32 years.

I don't know how old this bio is, John, is it 32 still or is it three by now? Almost 34 now. And he has two children and one grandchild, Clementine. Two grandchildren, so this bio is a little old. But James, thank you very much for coming.

The floor is yours.

Why Grandchildren Make You Think About the Future

I am fairly certain we updated that thing. Maybe I didn't save the changes but you have to be very careful when you have two grandchildren to always mention the second one. You don't want any favoritism starting.

She's only six months old so she probably wouldn't really notice it. But I think her sister would and so we need to be careful about that. But I'll have to admit, becoming a, how many grandparents do we have in the room?

Will you agree with me that almost nothing makes you think more about the future than you ever did before in your life than when your kids have kids? You know, having kids, that does it because when you're a young adult, you're married but you don't have any kids yet, you're just having fun, you know?

You're still just a youngin'. Now, I did get married and this is, I don't know why this is so unusual anymore but I was 19 and she was 18 and we didn't have kids for four years so it wasn't one of those situations where we needed to get married either.

So, I'm really thankful for that because my granddaughter was born two days after my 50th birthday which means that, you know, if I have a normal lifespan, I might actually get to see my great-grandchildren and that would be an exciting thing.

But nothing changes your perspective more to look forward and be concerned about things that will touch the next generations than when you have kids, okay, but then when you have grandkids, then you realize how old you're getting and the fact that, you know what, you want to leave something behind in this world.

So, you start thinking about things in a way that you, you're not just focused upon your own retirement and all me, me, me, me, me, all of a sudden you realize, you know what, there's going to be people after me and I have to admit, I wonder what kind of world my grandchildren are going to be facing.

Church History as a Mirror for the Present

Some of you may have noticed that there are weird things happening in my land right now. Personally, I do not like election cycles that last for two years. They get really tiring but I am a very concerned individual these days as to what's happening in all of our lands and all of our cultures and especially the subject this evening, what is happening in many of our churches.

The first class that I taught after I graduated from seminary was church history and I'm very thankful that I had an excellent church history professor in seminary. He excited me about the subject. Sadly, when many people teach church history, it's just sort of like, well, I'll try to get through this class or something like that.

And over the years as I've taught church history, I've tried to excite Christians about it because I think it's a fascinating subject, not just fascinating, it's one of the few times when we as Christians have the ability to sort of hold a mirror up to ourselves and get a little perspective so we can sort of see ourselves.

So often we're so close to the controversies of our day, so close to the things that we are involved in that it's difficult for us to have some perspective and to see what's really, really, really important in the long run.

And as I studied church history, I came to understand, I came to see that there really is a pattern down through the ages, that when you have people who are absolutely convinced that God has spoken, that God has given us His Word and He has spoken to us, I'm not sure if there's something I can do about this popping and stuff here.

I call these Britney Spears microphones and that is not meant as a compliment, okay? Not by any extent of things. In fact, what I'm going to do, if you don't mind, could we turn this one on over here?

I try with these as best I can. Test. Oh, yeah. I try with these as best I can, but my ears were not designed to have one of these things on them. And so you can turn that off and we will just go one-handed if that's all right with you.

I realize they give you great sound, but for me, they were designed by someone who would have done very well during the Spanish Inquisition. So anyway, the pattern that I have observed in church history, and certainly it's true in my land, when you have people who believe that God has spoken, then there is going to be a concern for God's truth that is going to be a balanced concern.

Because when you preach the whole counsel of God, as a minister, how many ministers do we have here in church this evening? When you exercise the discipline of preaching through the entirety of the word of God, not skipping the tough parts, not skipping the tough subjects or the tough books, I did a lengthy, I think, 80-sermon series through the book of Hebrews.

That is not an easy book to go through. There are certain sections that are a little bit tough there. We dealt with textual issues and all sorts of stuff, and that's not easy to do. And then I jumped from that into the holiness code.

Leviticus 18 through 20, now we're in Deuteronomy, working through some of the toughest, most difficult material you'd ever want to go through. When you force yourself to do that, what you're really saying to your people, not only are you demonstrating for them a respect for the word of God and that, you know, what is said in the classical text, all scripture is God-breathed.

Not just the red letters, not just the last 27 books, not just the last 27 books, plus the Psalms, plus some really fun stories in Genesis and Exodus. But all of scripture is God-breathed. Do we really believe that?

I think a lot of us, in our minds, will say yes, but in our practice, and especially if we're ministers, in our practice, we sort of demonstrate to our people that some parts are more inspired than other parts, when that's not what the scriptures themselves actually say.

There's a reason for those genealogies. There's a reason for all those long names that we're reading through right now in Joshua. We read through the Bible in our public reading, in our church. And there are some chapters, it's just like, and then Abinadab and Meadibu, and you're just going on and on, and people wonder why in the world you're doing this.

It's rooted in history. This actually took place. This isn't some mythology where you've got some mythical Mount Olympus and mythical beings that never really existed, and the things they did, they didn't really do it at a period of time or anything like that.

No. What God has done, he has done in history. He actually accomplished these things. He actually did these things. And when you have that kind of confidence in working through all of the word of God, what you're saying to your people is, we believe God has spoken.

And when you practice the proper means of interpreting scripture, and the reason we have rules is not so we can get one kind of message out of scripture, but the reason that you exegete scripture in a particular way, the reason we look at biblical languages.

So many people today, now I'm gonna, let me be honest, straight up front, I've taught both Greek and Hebrew, so you can say, well, you're prejudiced, you're just trying to get students. Well, I'm not teaching it right now, so I'm not really trying to.

But I do believe in the importance of the biblical languages. It used to be, back in the 1600s in England, you couldn't even get a master's degree without being able not just to read Greek by the time of your second year of study, you had to be able to debate in Greek by the second year of your study.

That was back in the 1600s, folks. Let me tell you something, that's not the standard we have in seminary anymore. In fact, I don't know a single New Testament professor that could debate in Greek today.

So things have changed, they've changed a lot, and not necessarily for the better. We have more information than anyone's ever had before, but I'm not sure any of us master that information nearly as well as people before us did.

I'm not one of those folks that believes in the modern idea, where especially the younger generation thinks everybody that came before them were idiots and had never thought things through because they didn't have the technology of an iPad or something like that.

No, I realize, our technology is wonderful, but I'm not sure really how well we use it. But the point is, when we take the time to exegete the text of scripture, when we do the work, and those of you who minister the word of God know it is work, to minister the word of God, what we're doing is we're showing respect for the one who gave it to us.

Because when you don't do that, then all you can do is take your own thoughts and stick them in there and present the people as if God said this. And a lot of people are doing that. I don't want to do that.

You shouldn't be following me, you shouldn't be following anybody. You should want to know what the word of God and the word of God alone says. And those rules for interpreting scripture exist so that it's God speaking, not me speaking.

Otherwise, I can make any passage say anything I want it to say. And unfortunately, that's exactly what's going on in many places in the world today. But going back to my main point, as I look at how people have done this, as I look at the seriousness that people have shown down through church history, it all came back to what they believed about the word of God.

And once a commitment and a firm conviction that God had spoken was lost, that person or that group of people or in modern history, that denomination will not be long for this earth. That are dwindling away in almost any land in the world today.

There are denominations, you can see, they're just getting smaller and smaller and smaller. There's two reasons why churches get smaller. One is that the nation in which they live is under the judgment of God, and no longer wants to hear what God has to say, and is busy amusing itself with this, that, or the other activity.

But the other reason the denominations die and wither away is because they become religious social clubs. They no longer have a message that the society recognizes is challenging to them and is even worth going to listen to.

And we see this with major denominations in the United States, in the Church of England, in the United Kingdom itself. When you have a denomination that can't even remove a minister because he's become an atheist, you have a denomination that's no longer serious in believing that God has actually spoken and he's revealed something true about himself.

And so clearly, from my perspective, when people ask, what's the greatest challenge that the church faces today? Well, certainly in certain lands, we have many of our brothers and sisters who suffer under Islamic persecution today.

There are many brothers and sisters this night that are in prison. And they know that simply, if they would just simply say, la ilaha illallah wa muhammadan razu lillah, if they would say the shahada, the doors would swing open and they would be released.

But they won't do it because they are committed to the person of Jesus Christ and the truth of Jesus Christ. And so we know that that's one form of persecution. That's one attack upon the church. We know there is in North Korea, for example, in places in China, tremendous persecution against Christians in those places by communist governments.

And we know that secularism is on the rise all through Western culture, all through the world, where men and women are being convinced that they are nothing but animals. They are nothing but highly evolved animals.

They have no transcendent purpose. There is nothing after this life. They can simply be focused upon their own self-gratification. There is no transcendent truth. There's no transcendent meaning. There is no creator.

Hence, there is no basis for law. Law has to be based solely upon the current prevailing opinions. And this is a tremendous attack, a tremendous attack upon the truth of God and upon the Christian faith itself.

And so you also obviously have all sorts of other kinds of attacks that are coming against us, but I think as long as the church remains convinced that her Lord has spoken, as long as the church remains convinced that we have a truth from God, that God has revealed himself, that we're not worshiping an unknown God or a God of our own mythology and our own thinking and our own imagination, that church remains strong.

But when the church loses its confidence that God has spoken, that church is a church that cannot stand. And that is a church that no longer has a message that has any meaning. To anyone in whose life the Holy Spirit is bringing conviction, whose life the Holy Spirit is working, they are looking for someone that can give them a true word.

There's a lot of people that will assure people. They'll say, I'll give you a message if you'll just follow me. But what results of the Spirit's work in someone's heart is looking for a true message that will meet the need that has now become apparent to that person because of the work of the Holy Spirit in their heart.

And if we don't believe that God has spoken, if we don't have a confidence in the word of God, we're not gonna be able to give that message. And as I see it, as we look around, especially in Christian academia, in the seminaries and universities that were once founded to actually promote the knowledge of God and to defend the truth of God, it's in those very institutions that there is such doubt, such doubt.

I went to a seminary for my first master's degree that was way to the left of where I had been raised. Now at the time, I'll be perfectly honest with you, I didn't know why the Lord was putting me through that.

It wasn't enjoyable. I didn't like going to certain classes and feeling like I was having to engage in battle with my professors. I had been taught to be very respectful to those from whom I learned, and I tried to be, and I think I succeeded primarily in that.

But there were many situations where I was exposed to all sorts of unbelief. And I know now why that happened. In hindsight, at the time, I didn't know. But in hindsight, I recognized that I've had so many situations now where I have debated individuals.

I have engaged in controversy with individuals. And I had a unique standing from which to respond to what they were saying, because I went to a seminary where, in essence, I had already studied their perspectives.

I already knew where they were coming from. I knew how to speak their language, in essence. And so I know why that happened. But still, it was in that kind of context that I saw people. I remember one man very clearly who came into that seminary.

And when I first met him, he started right around the same time I did. And he had a pretty firm conviction. He went to a decent church. By the time he graduated, he had a master of divinity degree in confusion.

A master's degree in confusion. He no longer was certain as to exactly what the Christian faith was, or what it said, or how he could answer fundamental basic questions that people would ask concerning what the faith was about and what the Lord would even require of them.

And it was a tragic thing to see. And when I see young men who are filled with zeal, and want to have knowledge to match to that zeal, and say, I'm gonna go off to seminary. And I'm like, okay, but I'm gonna pray for you, and please remember something.

I don't care where you go, I don't care who you study under, you must be discerning. You must, must, must recognize that even the best people, even the people whose books you may have learned a lot from, you've got to be discerning, you've got to hold them to a standard.

And whatever you do, you must recognize that you need to hold the same view of scripture that Jesus himself held, if you're gonna be a follower of Christ. Now, when was the last time you heard someone say that?

Say to you, you as a Christian need to hold the same view of scripture that Jesus held, you don't hear that very often. And in fact, I wonder how many of us, maybe as you're sitting there, if I were to ask you right now, I do have a handheld microphone, by the way.

And if I see anyone that starts to do the head bob type thing, or especially the worst thing is, the worst thing is when someone right down here falls asleep, and they start snoring. I can't handle that.

If you want to shorten a pastoral prayer while I'm preaching, start snoring. I cannot handle that at all. So if I see any of that, I am mobile. And all of a sudden, we might start doing some role playing, where I'm asking you the questions and stuff, and I just bring you on up here.

So that normally keeps people awake. The other thing I do is sometimes I have a laser pointer. I do have a laser pointer in my bag right down here. But I'm not displaying anything, so I really don't need to use it.

But it is a very bright laser pointer, almost illegally bright laser pointer. It's the type you shoot down planes with, okay? And so what I'll do is I'll tell folks, if you fall asleep, I will shoot my laser pointer into your mouth.

It'll make your eyes light up, and I will take a picture and put it on Facebook. And that normally keeps everybody awake. It really, really, really does. But anyway, as I said, do you hold Jesus' view of scripture?

How many of you started thinking, well, what was Jesus' view of scripture? Now, we might automatically just go, well, Jesus is God, so I mean, that's God's view of scripture. How can you have a higher view?

But if someone asked you, if you were on the train, or I just spent 36 hours traveling on planes. If you're on a plane and you're actually talking to someone, I try to avoid that as much as possible, but it sometimes happens.

And someone were to ask you, well, what was Jesus' view of scripture? How would you respond to that? How would you respond? Because you see, in our hyper-skeptical day, the primary enemies of the faith, people like Bart Ehrman, the Jesus Seminar, people along those lines.

They would tell you, no one has a clue what Jesus' view of scripture was, because no one has a clue of anything Jesus ever said. The hyper-skeptical person does not believe that any longer we have any means of knowing what Jesus said.

Bart Ehrman has been on a crusade now for many, many years to justify his apostasy. He is an apostate. He went to Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He claimed to be a Christian minister for a period of time in his life, and now is the primary critic of New Testament Christianity in the English speaking world.

And it's very clear when you look at the books that he has published over the past 15 years or so, the popular books, that is his intention to provide a foundation for any one of you who wants to disbelieve, to disbelieve.

He's gone after every single stage in the transmission of the scriptures. He started off by saying we can't know what the original manuscript said, that everything's been changed, so on and so forth. But he wasn't satisfied with that.

So now his latest book, he goes after the idea that any of the apostles could have accurately remembered anything Jesus said. And so you can't trust that they got it right even when they wrote it down.

You can't trust that what they wrote got transmitted to the first manuscripts. You can't trust that the manuscripts have been preserved down time. So you have every reason in the world to be like Bart Ehrman, a person who questions, a person who does not believe.

That's really what's going on there. And you must understand that even if you've never read a book by Bart Ehrman, almost every single university professor who teaches in English anywhere in the world has, and will be communicating those fundamental skepticisms to you, or to your children, or to your grandchildren.

Okay? And so we're all connected in one way or another. And unfortunately, my nation tends to export a lot of really bad stuff. And that's one of the things. And so what Bart Ehrman would tell you is, nobody knows what Jesus' view of scripture was.

Don't have a clue. We know what some highly educated Greek speaking people long after Jesus said he said, but we have no idea, we have no way of knowing anything beyond that. That kind of hyper skepticism is extremely rampant in our day.

Now, how many of you in this room have one of these? Cell phone. Come on, how many of you have a cell phone? Let's make it easier. How many of you do not have a cell phone? Well, God bless you, brother.

You know what that means? Now, unless you're like my fellow elder back in Phoenix. Elder does not have a cell phone, his wife does. But I know some people who have dumb phones instead of smartphones. Remember dumb phones?

You actually use them as a phone. You dialed numbers and you talked to people. Remember that? That seems like a very long time ago. I generally don't use my phone that way. I text people and it's really weird.

And I've fallen into the hole with all the rest of us. But because the vast majority of us have those devices, you cannot hide from this type of skepticism and this type of attack upon our faith. There's no place to hide anymore.

I realize that my grandparents' generation did not have to deal with many of the issues that we're going to be talking about during the course of this conference. They never talked about homosexuality, the redefinition of marriage, or anything else.

I assure you, my grandparents' generation had no interest in such things and never, ever, ever figured that anyone ever would. But they also didn't have to do much in regards to response to a lot of the types of attacks that we have upon the scriptures today.

But because we're all connected, because even some of you right now are having a hard time resisting looking at Facebook, you're maybe even posting a status on Twitter. I'm at the conference, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

I know. I'll see these things when I get back later on. I know it's happening. That means you are connected and you are exposed to these things. And you're exposed to what that means, then, is that there is even greater reason for you.

And I don't care what you do. I don't care if you work in street sanitation, construction, you work at a grocery store, you work at an airport, you teach in a university, I don't care. As long as you make a serious claim to having bowed the knee to Jesus Christ, and you want to be a servant of Christ, you want to be used of him to communicate his truth to others, what that means is it is now incumbent upon you, because of the culture in which we have been called to live, to know much more about how we got the scriptures and to have thought through in your mind why you believe they're authoritative, why you believe your scriptures versus somebody else's.

I mean, we're going to be having a debate in Johannesburg next week. And we're going to be talking about the view of Christ in the Bible and the view of Christ in the Quran. And there are many, many Muslims who very much want to have a conversation with you.

And yet they have another book of scripture and they believe your book has been corrupted. Have you thought through the reasons why you believe in the inspiration of the Bible when there are many people who call themselves Christian scholars that can be cited as evidence against you?

I mean, I will be absolutely honest with anybody who wants, I'll tell you straight up, in my land, and I think this is happening pretty much anywhere in the English speaking world, if you want to get ahead in academia, there is one particular word that you must avoid being associated with, being accused of believing, because it will be the end of any possibility you have to advance in the great exalted world of the Christian academy.

And it was up there on the screen beforehand in the very title of the conference. And it's that, as N .T. Wright put it, silly American doctrine of inerrancy. Actually believing that God can speak without stuttering.

Because that's really what we're saying. If you really believe that the scripture is theanustas, as Paul says, which does not mean inspired, it does not mean inspired. Inspired is a Latin term, inspiratu, to breathe into something.

Inspiration does not mean that God takes human words and breathes something special into them. That's not what it means. And that's not what Paul was communicating. When he used that very special term theanustas, you hear thea, theas, theology, God, and nustas, pneuma, spirit, God breathed, when he used that term he had something specific in mind.

It is as intimate as when I am speaking right now and if I hold my hand in front of my mouth I can feel inevitably breath. Because that's how we pronounce words, we form sounds, is through moving air over our vocal cords and then moving our mouth and our lips and so on and so forth.

And that is how we speak. And that's what's being said concerning the very words of God by Paul. It is God breathed. Well, if I believe that, then if God is God, if God made me able to speak, then I have to believe that he has a greater ability to communicate himself than I have to communicate myself.

He can't give me an ability that's greater than something that he has. And if I know that I can accurately communicate my thoughts and intentions to another human being, no matter how obtuse they might be.

I mean, there are a couple of times during my kids' teenage years when I started doubting my ability to do that. I mean, there are only a certain number of ways you can tell a 14-year-old to clean their room.

But they seemingly have the capacity of reinterpreting almost any element of human language into some other command. It's really an amazing thing. Only those of you who are parents fully understand what I'm talking about or you're young enough to remember being 14 and working really hard at coming up with excuses.

But the reality is that when I talk about inerrancy, when I say that God's word is without error, as it was given to us, there is no error in that. Now, we're going to have to spend some time thinking about what that means.

Because people come up with some pretty wild ways of defining error. But that God can communicate in the human languages that he himself decreed would exist in such a way as to accurately and perfectly communicate his will to his people.

When I say that, I realize I'm putting myself in a small minority when it comes to the Christian academic community. And I'm shutting myself out of many of the great schools today. Because you're simply not allowed to believe that.

It is considered to be truly enlightened and even on one level spiritual to go, well, you know, some of the greatest beauties of scripture are found in its contradictions. I mean, we truly touch the very heart of God when we allow the tensions of scripture to stand as they are and we don't seek to harmonize them.

Look, like I said, I went to a liberal seminary. I could do this all night long. It sounds wonderful. I can use all the flowing language and everything else. But what's the result? The result is, well, we don't really know.

We don't really know because, well, you know, Paul and James contradicted each other and Matthew has his purposes and Mark his and Matthew changes Mark and so obviously Matthew disagreed with Mark on things and Luke's off doing his own thing and John was on another planet and you end up...

This is the reason that I tell Christians. You know where the single most dangerous place is for a Christian when it comes to, spiritually speaking, a Christian bookstore. A Christian bookstore. Because your defenses are down.

Your defenses are down. And what you need to realize is there are coiled snakes on every single shelf just waiting to strike. They really are. And especially in the commentary section. You think that's the safe spot.

You managed to get past the Benny Hinn section pretty safely, okay? You know? You had enough sense to go, oh, no, no, no. Not going there. I'm not getting blown over by someone whipping their Armani suit around at me.

No, I'm good. You thought you got away. And you made it to the commentary section. Ah, come on. A bunch of old Greek and Hebrew professors. How can they be any threat? Oh, let me tell you. Let me tell you.

Because you've been asked to do a Bible study. But you've been asked to do a tough Bible study. You've been asked to do something in Deuteronomy. Oh, Deuteronomy. Okay, so I need to go find myself a commentary.

Let me tell you something. We gave up the Old Testament to the liberals about 150 years ago. And that doesn't mean that there aren't still good Old Testament teachers that are teaching good things and that there aren't good commentaries being published.

But in general, in general, there are very few modern commentaries that I can recommend in major portions of the Old Testament. Because you pick up Deuteronomy and you think, well, I'll tell you a quick story.

Uh, that clock's not right, is it? No way! Okay, I'm sorry. I'm going way... Okay, anyway, I'm going to talk faster now. Ha! Jet lag. Okay, I can claim it now. I'm over 50 and I'm jet lagged. So we're good.

When I was in seminary, I took a class on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. I loved my professor. I knew he was to my left, but he was a good man and he was one of those few people that would allow me to express myself and he respected that there were differences of opinion, things like that.

I don't know that there's many people like that out there anymore. But anyways, and one of our assignments was we were given a commentary on all five books and we had to read the commentary and write a review.

Positives, negatives, interact with the text of the commentary. And I was given Gerhard von Roth's commentary on Deuteronomy. So if you went into a Christian bookstore today, you could find Gerhard von Roth's commentary on Deuteronomy.

And my professor, when he assigned the text, he said to all of us, he said, I think this is the best commentary available on Deuteronomy. Great. So I was a good student. I read the entirety of that commentary.

And I sat down to write my review. And you had to write your positives and your negatives. And so I started with the positives first. And here's what I wrote. This book has a wonderful binding. And then I moved on to the negatives from there.

And I got a 98 on the review. Give him credit because he could tell I had read and read carefully. But there wasn't anything else positive I could say because it was so clear. Von Roth comes from way off to the left and he has all of this freight that he brings in and presuppositions about how there probably wasn't even anybody called Moses.

And all of this has just been cobbled together from this source and that source. And the result was, I don't know why he bothered to write this book on Deuteronomy. Other than, you know, let me tell you one thing.

I can guarantee to you, Gerhard von Roth's view of Deuteronomy is not the view of Jesus in the Gospels. That I could tell. That I could tell. And that's what I mean by it being dangerous. And I'll tell you this.

In liberal seminaries and schools, the responses that believing scholars have given to alleged errors in Scripture and contradictions and tensions. That's a nice way of saying contradiction, by the way.

If you don't want to offend somebody, you say, well, there are tensions in Scripture. What they mean is contradiction. The responses that have been written and have existed for a long, long time are utterly ignored in liberal seminaries.

They don't think we have anything meaningful to say. They do not study our books. They do not study what we have to say. They just assume that when we see these things, we start drooling and go into a fit and that's it.

They don't study what we have to say. Every time I've ever debated a liberal, when I debated Bart Ehrman, I don't think he'd even Googled my name. He certainly had not read anything I'd ever written because he doesn't feel that we have anything meaningful to say.

I had read everything, including his doctoral dissertation. They don't do that for us. They don't do that for us. Now, in conservative schools, we study the liberals. We read their books because we recognize that's a necessary thing to do to be able to formulate a meaningful response.

But the liberals don't do that. So that's a little bit of a taste of where we are in the world today. So I recognize that when I talk about inerrancy, when I say I believe that God not only gave us God, my God is so big that he can inspire Scripture in such a way that it actually perfectly communicates exactly what he wanted his church to have from eternity past.

I think my God's big enough to do that. And that makes me weird. And if you believe me, that makes you weird too. But we need to have a basis for our weirdness because there's a lot of people out there that say, you're just ignoring basic things.

Trust me, I'm not. I've seen more contradictions than your average bear has. I mean, I'm dealing with Mormons, atheists, Muslims. I'm dealing with a lot of folks that have a lot of reason to poke holes in the Scriptures.

And I've seen a lot of them. But I've never seen one that has made me go, yep, there you go. Obviously the original author was in error at this point and the teaching here is in error. It's historically wrong or whatever else.

I've never found one. There are some tough ones to deal with. There's all sorts of places where I have to go, we don't know. We don't have enough information. What's happened is the enemy of the faith has come to conclusions on issues where they don't have sufficient basis to come to conclusions.

I mean, sometimes in the Old Testament, we're talking about a text that's 3 ,000 years old. And that means there's all sorts of historical stuff that we don't know about. There's been lots of accusations made against the Old Testament over the years that later archaeological information has helped to shed light on.

But still, you can dig something up and it can be interpreted one way, interpreted another way, until you get another piece of information. There's all sorts of areas like that. But I have never found anything that has convinced me that Jesus was wrong when he identified the very words of Scripture written by Moses as the very speaking of God.