Before He ever put it on paper on earth

"The injunction by the Apostle Paul to 'preach the Word' . . . I heard a man on the radio just the other day, a very famous radio preacher, talking about 'how you need to preach the Word' and he was going over Nehemiah 8 about the mechanics of how to preach the Word.

"I'm listening and he's reading out of an English Standard Version," recalls Richard Jordan. "I thought, 'You know, if you set the guy down and asked him,' and I've done this with people of great reputation like this guy: 'When you talk about preaching the Word, do you mean that one in your hand? Are you sure that ESV is THE absolute infallible Word of God that you possess?' You know what he would say? 'No, absolutely not.'

"You say then, 'Well, where is that Word that you're to preach?' He'd say, 'Well, it's infallible in the original.' Problem with that is you've never seen an original. There's never been one book on Planet Earth in any man's possession that was nothing but the originals.

"Did you know that the originals weren't the originals when they were originally given? You ever thought about that? If Psalm 119 says that, 'For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven,' it means the Word was in heaven before He ever put it down on paper on earth.

"Well, if the original was in heaven, and when He first wrote the Scripture here on earth it was a mirror of what was in heaven, what was this one?

"Now, I don't want you to go off and say that I'm saying the originals weren't the originals, but there's a sense in which they weren't.

"People worry about translating: 'Well, you can't translate from one language to another completely, fully.' I think, 'You know, anybody who goes around telling you that, and telling you that with a straight face like it's supposed to make sense and you're supposed to say, 'Oooh, okay, that means I can't really have a Bible,' never thought about what the original Bible was to start with.

"There's never been one book on Planet Earth possessed by any man that had nothing but the original manuscripts in it. By the time Paul wrote, all the original manuscripts of the Old Testament were lost, gone.

"So, the originals weren't the only issue, but you know when you come to translating . . . think about taking God's thinking--deity thoughts, when the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit communicated among themselves--and translating those deity thoughts into human words. If you can take the thinking of God . . . 

Isaiah 55: [8] For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.

[9] For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

"He could take His thoughts, crystallize them down into human language and write them down. Now, there's the translation challenge! If you can do that, it's a hop, skip and a jump for a blind man to go from one human language to another. There's the big step. And you get people talking about Bible translations that never considered the fact that the original writing of the Scripture was a translation out of deity thoughts into human thoughts to start with.

"God didn't come down here and just start thinking like a man thought and then decide to write a book. 'Thy word is settled in heaven forever.' You go to Psalm 8 and He talks about wisdom there and how He created the heaven and the earth with wisdom, understanding and knowledge that He had BEFORE. Wisdom says, 'I was there before He created anything.' God already has His own thoughts before He ever created anything.

"So, God's thinking then is put into human thinking, into the language of angels first and then, a little lower than the angels, into the language of men. You see, God communicating His Word takes into consideration all of the language issues.

"Now, until the Tower of Babel you didn't have all that 'catastrophe languages,' but then who was it that scattered the languages in Genesis 11? It was God.

"I'm telling you, He knows how to do all the translating, but what Satan was concerned about was challenging Eve's . . . seeking to beguile Eve into not trusting the word she had received from her husband. You and I are to have a received-text mentality."

(new article tomorrow)