Ray and Darryl

What a touching story Jordan told today of how Tennessee preacher Ray Watson, on his death bed with a blood platelet count of “zero” following a fall in his bathtub, asked his wife of 56 years three times if she would be okay without him if he gave up fighting his long battle with Leukemia. Betty assured him she would be.

Death has taught me that you never really know how much someone is a part of your frame of reference, your subconscious, your psyche, until they’re gone. The reality of their death plays out in ways you can never predict.

After calling a friend to tell her I learned on Facebook that Ray was in ICU and failing, she told me to call her if I got further news. Upon informing her days later that he died, we both acknowledged that our minds had been filled with thoughts of him. We were able to share some of our fondest memories.

Ray was a sensitive, down-to-earth, insightful, super-steadfast man of the faith who you could put your absolute complete trust in. He was funny and engaging, friendly and empathetic. You knew he loved the Word and was always in it. No matter what kind of physical pain or discomfort he was in, he was always cheerful and a joy to be around.

One time Ray showed me the manuscript of a book he’d written on the Book of Revelation. I flipped through it and thought, “I could never read this; it’s so complex!” I remembered being so impressed that he tackled such a subject and did it so thoroughly.

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The fact that Ray was a good ol’ boy from Tennessee made me think of Darryl Mefford, a like-minded, kindred-spirit preacher in LaFollette, Tenn., who died in 2003 from a swift-moving Leukemia he didn't even know he had. He was only 39 years old.

Here is an old article I wrote as a tribute to him shortly after his death:

In the bottom shelf of my dresser I keep a bag of unlabeled cassette tapes filled with audio sermons I've recorded off the internet.

Yesterday, I pulled one out at random and it turned out to be a study on Bible manuscripts Darryl Mefford had delivered live over the internet service PalTalk.

Mefford was giving his cyberspace lesson from his home, simply using a microphone plugged into his computer. At the very end of the 40-minute recording he suddenly feared he'd lost his live PalTalk connection.

"Y'all still out there, ain'tcha?" he asks moments after telling everyone listening to "go back to the book of Proverbs just a  minute with me—look at Proverbs. . ."

There's a 15-second pause in the tape and then Mefford asks again, "Can y'all hear me?" Another 15 seconds or so goes by before he says, "Can y'all hear me—are y'all there?"

The next utterance, following another 10-15 second pause, is something he's whispered to himself, which sounds to me like, "Now, doggone it." There's another pause and then he whispers, "What's happened?" The recording goes dead just after this.

I thought, "What a great sermon he was giving and then to have it end so abruptly where he doesn't even know whether anything he's said has even gotten through."

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For those whose curiosity is now piqued, here's sort of a CliffsNotes version of Mefford's sermon entitled, "The Lost Original Manuscripts." For the most part, the words are all Mefford's and I've just re-arranged, condensed and paraphrased here and there.

Here it is:

The question for us is, "When we lost the original manuscripts, did we lose the Word of God? Did we lose the Bible?"

If you listen to the majority of churches and the popular preachers and teachers, it's almost universally accepted that when we lost the original manuscripts we lost the perfect, infallible and inerrant Word of God.

It is the belief of the majority of Christians today that only in the original writings was the Word of God pure and perfect and inerrant and without any errors whatsoever.

One man wrote that the Bible was “like Ivory soap—it's ninety-nine and one-quarter percent pure.” One fellow said about that, “Well, you know rat poison is only one percent poison.”

That's all it takes, folks! Absolute correct observation.

This thinking, "We've got the Word of God pretty close, but we still don't have it perfect," just will not do in light of what God has said about His Word.

This low view of the Bible has resulted in people—well, when you tell people the Bible's got errors in it, you're casting a doubt on God's Word and no wonder folks won't pay any attention to the words on the page . . .

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Let's examine this reality first: If we still possessed the original manuscripts, no doubt people would be worshipping those original manuscripts.

You see an instance of something like this in the history of the nation of Israel. In Numbers 21:6, it says the "LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died."

This is the account of the "plague of serpents" that God sent among the nation of Israel and, in the account, Moses prayed for the people and the Lord told him, "Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live."

Moses makes this serpent of brass, places it on a pole and anybody that would just simply look upon that brazen serpent, upon that serpent of brass, would be healed of their snakebite.

Now what Israel ends up doing with this serpent of brass is very interesting—they keep it. Turn to II Kings 18 and you'll see the serpent of brass that Moses made back in the book of Numbers shows up many years later, and that the people had taken to worshipping it.

Beginning in verse three, talking about King Hezekiah, it says, "He did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, according to all that David his father did.

"He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan."

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Now in this passage, the "high places," their built-up places, where were they offered sacrifice to idols. He brake the images; the various images they had made. He cut down the groves—that was a stand of trees and in that stand of trees went on the worship of idols among the nation of Israel and, of course, Israel got all this from the heathen Gentile nations that were around them.

They had kept that serpent of brass all that time and so finally here it became an object of worship for them. They began to recall the history of that serpent and worshipped it, no doubt, as a healing god.

In Judges 17:5, you find the man Micah who "had an house of gods, and made an ephod, and teraphim, and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest."

Teraphim is a healing god and they were worshipping that serpent of brass as a healing god because of what had happened back there when anybody who had that snakebite looked at that serpent of brass on the pole and they lived.

So that's where you get people taking various things which they consider to be sacred and so forth and then often turning those things into an idol and worshipping them. No doubt that's what would happen if we still possessed any of the original manuscripts some place. There would be people who would worship them as being holy and as being above all other manuscripts or copies of the bible.

And, indeed, if you listen to the men that come out from the theological seminaries, they really do worship the original manuscripts even though we don't possess them. They constantly talk about how the original manuscripts are superior to the copies that we do have, which are somehow less than the Word of God.

So you see the great danger in having the originals and you see that, even without them, religion has placed upon them an importance God has not given them.

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There's another instance of this kind of worship from the early days of the Catholic Church. The Church had a practice of the sale of relics and people thought there was tremendous spiritual value if they possessed an actual piece of the cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified.

There was said to be enough pieces of the cross around to build a ship out of them. People take these things and they make objects of worship out of them.

Now, let's look at this from another angle:

I Peter 1:23-25 says, "Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.

"For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:
"But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you."

When it says "all flesh is as grass" and "the grass withereth," he's contrasting that with the issue of the incorruptible Word of God, "which liveth and abideth forever."

The Bible uses the word "corruption" to talk about the pagan process of a dead body. That's how it's used over and over again.

 

In Acts 2, it says of the resurrection of Christ, "that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption."

Acts 2:26 says, "Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption."

Now when I die, my body is going to begin to rot and to decay, but the body of the Lord Jesus Christ did not see corruption. When that body was placed in the tomb it never saw corruption.

I don't care what the seminaries say, and I don't care what preacher says it or who they are, that verse in Peter says the Word of God would live and abide forever, and so what people have adopted in Christian circles today is a humanistic view of the transmission of the Bible text that contradicts what Peter says. He says it lives and it abides forever as opposed to "all flesh," which is as the grass that withereth and the flower that fadeth away.

After a rose blooms, it's already begun to pass away; it's begun to decay. It's begun to die and pass off the scene, and, well, the original manuscripts had to do that. It was an absolute necessity that the original manuscripts be lost. It was an absolute necessity that the original manuscripts pass off the scene because of the very fact of the material it was written upon.

Now you know some of the manuscripts of the Bible were written upon animal skins. Well, that's the flesh and all flesh is like grass. It was not an indestructible material. Other manuscripts were written upon papyrus and things of that nature.

I once visited a library in Rugby, Tenn., which houses books that are a couple of hundred years old. You're required to wear special gloves to look at them and you're not allowed to take any pictures, or do any kind of filming, because it destroys the fibers—the fibers are so fragile. The point is we don't write things upon indestructible materials. Even if something was put on CDs, it still wouldn't be indestructible.

Folks have to make a choice to either believe what God said about His Word or believe what man says. The choice is to believe God or man.

When we preach the gospel, it doesn't matter which age or in what dispensation, man is always required and called upon to believe God's Word to Him and, folks, the Word of God is the very foundation of our faith. The Word of God is what we're asked to believe. We're asked to take God at His Word. That's what faith is and this is the Word by which the very gospel is preached unto you.

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The losing of the originals did not mean we lost the Word of God because there are too many verses that talk about the fact God would keep His Word and preserve His Word.

In Isaiah 30:8, we learn the very fact of God writing His Word down was so that it could successfully journey through time and history to all of humanity. The command is, "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."

God wrote down His Word that it would endure forever and yet we're told by seminary professors and big-shot preachers, and modernists and liberals, that God's plan failed. We're told that God wrote His word down in those original manuscripts, but when the original manuscripts passed away and we lost them, well, then we lost the Word of God.

God said go write it before them in a table, note it in a book. Why? What's the purpose? The word "that" means a purpose. You're about to get a purpose statement of why God wrote His Word down and noted it in a book—"that it may be for the time to come forever and ever."

If we had to have the originals for the Word of God to still be here, then God would have written that original down on some kind of indestructible material that wouldn't decay.

But He didn't; He wrote on something that would decay and pass away and the necessity would be for the Word of God to be copied and God said He wrote it down that it would be for the time to come!

No matter how long God allows man to be here, no matter if it's another 10,000 years before we got to point of eternity, God's Word would be here and, folks, this Word extends all the way out.

Psalms 12:6-7 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."

Psalms 33:11 says, "The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations."

The whole 119th Psalm (made up of 176 verses) is about the Word of God.

In verse 140, it says, "Thy word is very pure: therefore thy servant loveth it."

Verse 152 says, "Concerning thy testimonies, I have known of old that thou hast founded them for ever."

Verse 89 says,  "For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven."

Now, some folks like to take you to task with verse 89. I read an article one time where a man said, "Yes, God's Word is settled in heaven, but it's certainly not settled on the earth."

Well, now, the Word of God originated in heaven and came from God down to this earth. Did we somehow lose the settledness and the sureness and the steadfastness of the Word of God when it came from glory down to this earth? When God by inspiration spoke it, did we somehow lose that issue of it being settled? That isn't the ideal of this passage—to say, "It's settled in heaven but it sure ain't settled on the earth."

It's settled in what God said. It's settled that God would keep His Word that He wrote it, that He gave it and that He'd preserve it through time and history. Folks that believe in the Bible, believe the Word of God. And God said it and that settles it; it doesn't matter if folks believe it or not; you understand the point I'm trying to make?

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There used to be an old saying years ago, "God said it, I believe it and that settles it." Well, no, it's actually, "God said it and that settled it." It doesn't matter if you believe it or not.

Romans 3:3 says, "For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?"

Whether you believe it or not, God is still faithful to do what He said He would do.

We didn't lose the settledness of God's Word when it came from glory down to this earth. We didn't lose that. That Word is still settled today. It's here. It's on the earth. It's available.

The psalm says, "Concerning thy testimonies, I have known of old that thou hast founded them for ever." If something's founded forever, it's settled. There's no question about it, it's settled.

Notice Psalms 119:160 says, "Thy word is true from the beginning." Notice it says from the beginning. Notice it doesn't say in the beginning. That's real important that you notice that. Thy word, he says, is true from the beginning.

Now what does that mean when he says from the beginning? Well, that means it was true in the beginning but I'm removed over here more than 2,000 years from when God said "in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."

 I'm removed more than 2,000 years from the time of Christ. I'm removed way away from when God originally first began to give His Word to man.

His Word was true in the beginning but it's true from the beginning as well.  That means I still have it even though I'm way removed in time and history from the beginning; God's Word is still true.

The last part of verse 160 says, "and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth forever." Now how is God going to do that? Well, God said that He would do that through copies of the Word.

The originals were written on materials that would pass away and be lost precisely to necessitate the fact that it would then have to be copied. And when the Word goes from the original to the copy, nothing is lost. The authority of it is not lost. The purity of it is not lost. It is no less the Word of God. It is preserved from generation to generation by being written down in copies. Copied from age to age, it is still God's Word.