Going right along with what I posted last night about God's Word being preserved through time, here is an outtake from this morning's sermon by Columbus, Ohio preacher David Reid:
In other words, the original autographs were perfect, but after that, "No guarantees." They were perfect but then, you know, there were copyists and errors and mistakes and "we have something that's pretty good and it is mostly reliable; it doesn't have serious error and you can find the truth somewhere in the Word of God."
The typical fundamentalist doctrinal statement today will restrict what it believes about the Word of God to inspiration and not preservation.
It makes NO sense for God to inspire His Word and then misplace it. Is that what happened? God inspired the original autographs, He cared about the originals, but He didn't care if they got misplaced over time and so He let errors creep in and, of course, man is fallible and he makes mistakes and so what we have today is pretty good but it's not really the inerrant authoritative Word of God. This is the conventional wisdom of fundamentalists who will not include a statement about preservation.
I Thessalonians 2:13: [13] For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.
What is it that causes the Word of God to work effectually in your life? It's that you believe it. You see that?
The reality is that the Word of God is of little to no effect in many Believers' lives because they simply don't believe it.
Have you ever heard someone say, "Well, the original Greek says"? When they say the original Greek says, what are they implicitly saying? The English is wrong.
And so they're going to quote to you the original Greek because that's the one that's correct and what we have in English--"Well, it's just a translation and it doesn't get everything right and it has mistakes."
HOOEY! Think soberly for a moment. If God's preservation of His Word was limited to the original autographs, well those are LOST! You realize those don't exist? They're lost to history; you can't go find they anywhere.
So some will say, "Well, it's not limited to the original manuscripts but it's limited to the original languages, so therefore what you have to do is you have to really read the Word of God in Hebrew and Greek to really understand."
Well, think about that with me. The original autographs are actually written in three languages, not two. They're written in Hebrew and Aramaic. Now are you going to say that, "Well, to really understand the Word of God you have to have a command of all three of those languages"?
There's roughly 8 billion people on the earth. How many of those people on the entire earth are actually fluent in all three of biblical Greek, biblical Hebrew and Aramaic?
Maybe 5-6 billion. You realize that the number of people who can actually speak all of those languages fluently is next to nothing. And if that is true, then God's method of preserving His Word is He's made it available only to a few scholars.
How many people on the earth trying to eke out a living have the time to become experts in all three of those languages?! When they're just trying literally to get through the day and feed their family?
So is that the way God preserved His Word? He preserved it in these languages that next to no one knows, and then for you to actually interact with His Word you have to go find a scholar who will tell you what it means?!
Is that what God did? That's crazy! That's nonsensical. You can decide for yourself, but this is what I happen to believe. What happens in the last 500 years is England becomes "the empire in which the sun never sets." English becomes the first global language since what? Since before Tower of Babel.
There was a global language at one point in Genesis, was there not? Before the Tower of Babel there was. But then God confounded the languages and it's never been quite the same. But the closest thing we've have to a global language is English.
What happened is that as the British Empire is becoming the empire in which the sun never sets, as English is becoming the trade language of the world, what then happens is the greatest missionary effort in the last thousand years and it's done with what? A King James Bible in the English language.
If you believe modern textual theory, what's happened in the last 150 years is that "we FINALLY found the right manuscripts. We found Sinaiticus in St. Catherine's monastery. We found Vaticanus."
Guess where Vaticanus was? The Vatican. "And we found the Dead Sea Scrolls, and all these happened in the 1800s to 1900s and now FINALLY we have the right manuscripts!"
That is a crazy, crazy thing to believe. Why do I say that? Get Psalm 12: [6] The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.
[7] Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.What was God's promise with respect to preservation? Did He say, "Well, I might lose it for a thousand years or so, but I won't permanently lose it. I'll bring it back so you can see it later."
That's not what that verse says. "Thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever," which means the Word of God is always available. People act like the Word of God is misplaced and then "we find little clues here and little clues there and then we can reconstruct it."
If you believe that, then what you are saying is that the correct authoritative Word of God was not available for 1,500 years before then because what happens to those other manuscripts?
You see the point? It's crazy to think there's NEW manuscript evidence that is true, because if it is true, if it actually has the correct reading of the text, then it means we didn't have the correct reading for 1,000-plus years and God's promise to preserve it was wrong. I don't believe that for a second.
When I Thessalonians 2 says that the Word of God works effectually in you who believe, what I would suggest to you is the most spiritually healthy thing you can do is locate where the Word of God is and believe it.
When you're spending your time correcting it or doubting it, you're not BELIEVING it! And if you're not believing it, it's not working in you.