(Editor's note: Working on a new article. Currently enjoying Kansas City--here for the weekend attending a wedding. In the meantime, here's an article from my old website, lisaleland.com)
In the early-to-mid-1900s, in order to avoid being mocked by neo-orthodox elitists, Bible-believing fundamentalists began to ditch the idea of “mechanical dictation.”
The elitists laughed, “Why, you believe God just mechanically dictated through a person?!’ and the term “mechanical dictation” became a bugaboo.
“Over the past 40 years, I’ve encountered Bible-believing fundamentalist people who want to defend the fundamentals of the faith but get real bent out of shape when it comes to saying the Bible was dictated,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan. “Well, God certainly did dictate it.
“ ‘My tongue is a pen of a ready writer,’ wrote David. “Well, that sort of sounds like dictation to me, and when God reaches down into the library of the vocabulary of a writer and selects the words out of their vocabulary and puts them on the page. . .
“You see, inspiration doesn’t mean God doesn’t use the instrument. I’ve got a pencil in my pocket and when I write with it, you know what it looks like? It looks like a pencil. I’ve got a pen in my pocket. When I write with it, it looks like a pen.
“In other words, when you write something, it takes on the character of the instrument you’re writing through, but do you know who’s doing the writing? Me. So, it’s not all that terribly screwball of an idea to believe God wrote the Word of God, using the instrumentality of more than 40 different people in various ways, and that He super-intended all.”
*****
When neo-orthodoxy came on the scene in the early-to-mid-1900s, the thinking was, “We don’t want to be like those dumb orthodox fundamentalists, but we don’t want to be like those modernists over here either.”
What they wound up with is reasoning that said, “Well, the Bible contains the Word of God; It’s not the Word of God, but it contains the Word of God. Within the Bible you have God’s Word, but the Book itself isn’t.”
Jordan confirms, “Neo-orthodoxy would say, ‘It really doesn’t matter if Adam was a real person or not. Or if Noah really experienced a universal flood. It’s the message of the Fall that’s important.’
“You see, they believe in the Fall; they didn’t discount that. They believe in Satan. They believe in a Judgment. But the vocabulary and the mechanism to communicate that through the story of Adam, well, that might not have ever happened.”
*****
Fundamentalists wound up making this their position too, saying, “Yes, the message is true, but the Book you get it out of isn’t.”
Jordan says, “The funny thing to me—as I observe it and it really does sort of make you chuckle—is you have people holding a doctrinal statement, and demanding obedience and allegiance to that doctrinal statement, but they don’t believe the Book they got the doctrinal statement out of! They believe their doctrinal statement’s infallible but the Book they get it out of, well, it has mistakes in it!
“That’s always kind of baffled my capacity to understand. Of course, then you get into the issue of the Bible versions. Just last night I had a man ask me about this. I told him what I tell you people here: I believe you should believe and trust the Bible you’re using, I don’t care which one it is, and when you find it has a mistake in it, it’ll teach you that it’s got mistakes.
“Now, if you believe the Bible ought to have mistakes in it, you’ll be happy with yours, but if you think the Bible ought not have mistakes in it and you’ve got one that does, it’s going to teach you you better not trust it—it must not be the right one.
“That makes sense to me. I’ve told you this story before about how I was at the (Christian) bookstore one time and started talking to a young man in the Bibles section who said he’d been saved only a short while and was looking to buy a good study bible.
“I asked him, ‘Well, what are the criteria you’re looking at?’ and he answered, ‘Oh, I want one with a good cover on good paper that will last.’ And I said, ‘Well, the thing I always want to be sure of is I have a Bible that doesn’t have mistakes in it.’
“He asked what I meant and I said, ‘I tell you what to do, check Mark 1:2. If that verse says, ‘It is written in Isaiah the prophet. . .,’ and the reality is the passage quoted is from a verse in Malachi, you’ve got a problem.’ I said, ‘Just start checking them out and when you find the one that doesn’t have that mistake in it, that’s probably the one you ought to have.’
“Twenty minutes later, I came back to the guy and he was still going through the different bibles, looking. He said, ‘I haven’t found one yet,’ but I knew that once he got down to the right-hand bottom corner, where they kept the King James copies, he’d find it had Mark 1:2 correct.”
*****
Jordan continues, “The first thing you have to get settled in your understanding is what it is God preserved. What did He write? He wrote some words in a book. The Book’s called ‘the Word.’ Do you see that it’s not just a message; it’s some words on a page that make up the Book?
“It’s all through the Scripture this way. In Jeremiah 15:16, Jerry’s in the dumps about his ministry and says, ‘Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts.’
“Notice there’s the word, singular, and it’s made up of the words, plural? In Scripture, the Word of God is considered to be the words of God.
“In Isaiah 30:8, God says, ‘Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever.’ Why did He want it written down in a book? ‘That it may be for the time to come for ever and ever.’
“When you write something down on paper. . . I was listening to a woman just the other day talking about how when you order something over the Internet and there’s a problem with it, you need to document everything, writing down who you talked to and getting it on paper. And the lady said, ‘The more documentation you have, the better chance you have of winning the thing.’ Well, the idea is, ‘We want it on paper. Put it in writing so I’ve got a record of it.’ Because then you can preserve the history that way.
“The reason God wrote it—He didn’t just speak the words—and caused some of them to be written down is because He wanted them to be preserved. Now, there’s two things about that: If you write it down, everybody can have their own copy to read for themselves. But also, if everybody’s got a copy of it and I lose my copy, did we lose the Word of God? No, everybody else has got a copy.
“And if I’m copying one out, and I lose a page of mine, well, everybody else has got the page. So there’s protection. There’s a mechanism for preserving it through this copy and multiplying it so everybody has a copy.
“Isaiah 29:18 says, ‘And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness.’ Now, that’s talking about the kingdom that’s future from where we are and notice what the deaf are going to hear?
“They’re not going to hear the message; they’re going to hear the words and they’re going to be hearing the words Isaiah wrote down, and Isaiah wrote them down so they could be preserved forever and ever—so that a dude out there way into the future from where we are today (Isaiah’s 700 years before Christ and we’re 2,000 years after Christ so that’s 2,700 years) is going to be able to read the words Isaiah wrote down in that Book! Now we call that ‘preservation of the Bible.’
“In Psalm 12: 6-7 is one of these famous passages people don’t like. It says, ‘The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.’
Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.’
“God’s fixed His Word so it won’t be dissolved and lost and the Word of God is perfect; it’s pure according to its own testimony about itself. Well, if that’s true, that answers the question about how it was written.
“In Verse 7, when it says ‘thou shalt preserve,’ that’s saying that what God wrote, He’s going to preserve. Now, I know all about the people who say, ‘Well, that’s a bad translation and it shouldn’t be that and it shouldn’t be this,’ and that’s just a bunch of hooey. I’ve studied the Hebrew text there too.
“When they tell you, ‘Well, it really can’t be that because it’s singular and it’s this and that,’ that’s just their opinion written and designed to teach what they want taught. It’s not true; it’s just their idea about it because they don’t want it to be the Word of God preserved.
“The cheap way of handling the Bible when you don’t like what a verse says, is you say one of two things. You either say, ‘A better translation would be. . .’ or, ‘A better reading in the Greek or Hebrew text would be. . .’, meaning, ‘A better manuscript would be. . .’
“And when you hear somebody say that to you, what they just said is, ‘We all can’t have a common Bible we can trust.’ Do you understand that if we all don’t have the same Bible that says the same thing, that we can all go home and study, dig into and research and understand, and not have to scratch words out of. . .
“I remember one time my boys came back from a Bible conference at Cedar Lake, Ind., and little Rick came in and was all proud and said, ‘Look, daddy, they told me to scratch these words out of Romans 8.’
“Imagine teaching an eight-year-old to scratch words out of his Bible! Now, I don’t know about you, but that wouldn’t encourage me to believe the Bible. They’ll say, ‘Well, they were hard to read,’ and I think, ‘Well, then teach him how to read! You read ’em, dontcha?!’
“People say, ‘Well, the King James is written in old English; it’s hard to understand.’ Listen, your mommy and daddy read it! Were they really all that much smarter than you and your kids?! Most of your life you didn’t think so, did you?!
“You know what all that is? That’s just being lazy. That’s all that is. It’s just people who don’t study. If you study something, you become familiar with the vocabulary associated with it. And if you aren’t familiar with the vocabulary, you don’t say, ‘Hey, let’s don’t use this vocabulary,’ You say, ‘Let’s spend a little time getting familiar with it.’ ”
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