No apology for apocrypha

In the apocrypha book of Tobit, there is a passage advocating magic where the smoke of a fish heart on a fire is said to drive away devils. 

Tobit 6: 5-7 reads, “So the young man did as the angel commanded him; and when they had roasted the fish, they did eat it: then they both went on their way, till they drew near to Ecbatane.
[6] Then the young man said to the angel, Brother Azarias, to what use is the heart and the liver and the gal of the fish?
[7] And he said unto him, Touching the heart and the liver, if a devil or an evil spirit trouble any, we must make a smoke thereof before the man or the woman, and the party shall be no more vexed.”

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People who despise the “King James Only” mentality of its adherents love to point out how the apocrypha is contained within the pages of the original 1611 King James Bible.

The apocrypha was deliberately placed between Malachi (the end of the Old Testament) and Matthew (the beginning of the New Testament) in the original King James Bible as a free-standing study aid, not Scripture. The problem with the Roman Catholic bible and the Sinaiticus manuscript is they have the apocrypha as an official part of the Old Testament.

To the skeptics, Jordan reasons, “Doesn’t the Bible in your lap have a concordance in it? Well, is that concordance a part of your Bible? It’s between the covers, isn’t it?

“So, you see, in one sense my Bible has a concordance in it. But my Bible doesn’t! It’s a study aid that came along with my Bible. And that’s exactly what the apocrypha was originally. About the mid-1600s, they quit putting it in. Up to that point all Protestant and Catholic bibles had it, but the Protestant bibles put it as a separate entity, not as a part of the text.

“So people who want to tell you that the King James Bible originally had the apocrypha in it, well it is true that it was between the covers. They did translate it. But they never put it as a part of the Bible text. They always said it was separate, recognizing that it was not Scripture, identifying it as apocrypha under that heading and listing it separately.

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“Now, that kind of half-there, half-not information . . . I say that to you so you understand you need to know what’s going on, so that when people throw all this stuff at you you’ve got some kind of ability to respond.

“Never think that the other side of an opinion doesn’t have good arguments. If you think the only good arguments are your arguments, then when you hear good arguments from the other side you’re going to say, ‘Whoa, hey, they got a good idea there.’ Not!

“There are good arguments on both sides of this issue. The question is how do you understand; how do you find the truth in the matter? How do you come to the place where you decide which is right and which is wrong?

“That’s why we started this study, ‘What are we looking for?!’ Because no matter how good the argument is, if you’re not looking for the right thing, your arguments aren’t on point. So, are we looking for w-o-r-d-s on the page that God wrote down and preserved through history, or are we just looking for a message; a general idea of what God said? Is that the issue? That’s really the two arguments of the two different camps and the fundamental basic thing that you have to grasp.”