Defense of the Faith - The Inerrancy of Scripture

I'm not normally one to start with stories, but I'm going to start with a story this morning and hopefully it becomes immediately obvious why I would start with a story. So this morning we're going to talk about inerrancy and how important it is for the Bible to be accurate and reliable and have no errors in it. So the story is brief so it'll be easy.

But this last week I had a business trip to North Carolina And one of my co-workers in North Carolina spent about 12 years building a small aerobatics airplane. And he invited me and another co-worker from the Denver area who were out on this trip to go up with him and fly on this airplane one at a time so that it's a two-seater plane. And we went up and we did some loop-de-loops and we did some barrel rolls and amongst some other things, which was just phenomenal. I'm an adrenaline junkie and that was just thrilling. But one of the things that you do when you get in an airplane is you actually trust that whoever put the airplane together and designed the airplane and engineered it and has tested it and taken it through all its paces actually did their job.

Because the consequence of there being a mistake or a problem in that is, well, you could have a shorter life than you might have initially expected, right? The plane falls out of the sky and you're done. Of course, the Lord is sovereign, so if he decided I needed to be home with him, the plane could have been perfectly sound and I could still need to go be home with him. He could have done something else, right? But errors and mistakes matter, right? In our day-to-day lives, that matters.

How many of you have crossed the border to go to Canada before? When you cross the border to go to Canada, the Canadians have a good sense of humor overall, and what I love is that when you cross the border, there's a sign that makes it very, very clear that it's 100 kilometers an hour and not 100 miles an hour. And there's like a smiley face on the sign, like they were texting you the message, right? And they don't want you to have the argument that I didn't understand or there was an error or a mistake and I didn't get it. When you get the ticket for going 100 miles an hour, they're going to really make sure that you understand that, right?

So, let's talk about inerrancy because in our own lives we have very practical understandings of the consequence of error, but we need to take that into consideration when we talk about God's Word. The first sentence in here is a definition, and I always like to make sure we have that covered whenever we're dealing with a topic.

Inerrancy is the doctrine and idea that the Bible is inspired by God and is without error. We have already done a complex list of classes, and we've covered by bumping into it a little bit of inerrancy and how important it is to have the Bible be accurate, but we're going to continue to look at that. Why is it important within Christianity that inerrancy be a core tenet of our doctrinal understanding? What's the consequence of error in the Bible.

You could eliminate entire passages. I mean, you could eliminate the entire Bible and say that it's entire. But you start off with one argument and you say, well, this one's not real either, and neither is this one. So we'll cut out the book of 1 John, and after that we'll cut out the book of Luke.

Once you start to form the cracks and you start to chip away at the foundation, you have something that all of our faith rests upon entirely, right? Without the Word of God, would be a bunch of people gathering together like I have seen so often in various book clubs where they talk about the ideas of God or whatever from some inspiring book, not inspired book, but an inspiring book about how God is love and everything is nice, but it's your opinion versus my opinion because there's no external authority. But if you can remove that external authority then we've obviously got a serious concern. We're also going to take a look at not just inerrancy by itself, but I also want to kind of connect the dots between that and having the copies and the translations and kind of take a look at that as a holistic view. The skeptic wants to try to show that the text is unreliable in an attempt to erode the foundation of what we have.

This next little section here is actually a syllogism from Norm Geisler. There's a great book that I do recommend if you have the finances. It's called the Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics. Norm Geisler is the primary editor and there's a lot of good articles in there. If you ever want to just read one page of something and feel like you need to close a book and think about it for a really long time, I recommend this book. There's some really interesting thoughts as he and the authors that are in the book explored that together. The first part of the syllogism is that God cannot err.

I want to take a look at Hebrews 6.18 because I think that that's As you can see there, a list of places that tell us that, but I think Hebrews 6.18 is a succinct and clear statement of that. A syllogism is two facts and a deduction that can come from that fact. Sorry, I should have stated that earlier.

So, Hebrews 6.18 So that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to hold the hope set before us. So God cannot lie, oh I'm sorry, in 17 here, in the same way God desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of his purpose interposed with an oath. So he cannot lie and he cannot change. Alright, so we have this idea that error is not allowed and lying would be error, right? That's a pretty straightforward principle. Anybody feel uncomfortable with that? Just want to make sure, okay, so nobody's uncomfortable with that idea.

Again, if the Word of God can't have error in it or else we're in trouble, we'd really have a problem if God has an error, right? As we look at the scriptures, we see that God doesn't have error in him, but this is one of the places where his character is there. The next one is that God is, or the Bible is the word of God.

So I chose John 1.1, but there's multiple places where we can see that God inspired the text. And so then Norm Geisler suggests, therefore the Bible cannot err.

Is there anything logically complicated about that everybody can follow along that one thing leads to the next in that? It's in sequence. Everybody feels comfortable with that? Again, we talked about logical fallacies earlier in this class. I want to make sure everybody's following along and that when we're talking about logic, we're not sidestepping things or getting duped into something. So we have this idea that the Bible, by nature of being from God, should not have error in it. So then we want to talk about arguments for inerrancy that are from the text itself. So now that we've established that there is a logical reason for why the Bible should not have error in it. Let's talk about what some of those arguments are.

One of them is internal consistency and historicity, or a coupling of them. Internal consistency is really, really important. How many of you have ever watched a TV show where there's a court case going on? They have all kinds of these court lawyer mystery detective shows, right? And what they're looking for is a crack and they're looking for a change in the story from one or two characters that are in the context of the court case. The scriptures were written by several dozen or more authors over a thousand years time period, at least.

And yet there's consistency throughout. We don't find that there's one author saying one thing about God and another saying the complete opposite thing about God. We don't find God is righteous and God is evil in the same book and think, oh yeah, that's a problem. We can't have that.

So internal consistency in the doctrines and the things that are described. But the other thing that's important is that We've talked about progressive revelation, where the scriptures start at the beginning in Genesis and they move forward. As things are revealed, the authors in time continue to point back to the texts that are there as references. There's internal consistency and there's cross-checking and cross-references that take place that lend to consistency and an understanding that there's reliability and consistency of doctrine.

I have a very incomplete list of cross-references here. How many of you have a study Bible with cross-references that you read out of? That's pretty normal at this point in time. In fact, when I worked at the Christian bookstore, we sold very, very few Bibles that didn't have cross-references. Those were like the dollar-a-copy newspaper print Bibles, where they wanted to put the least amount of ink on the least amount of paper.

But otherwise, there's lots of cross-references where we can go and we can study and we can see the doctrines and explore them and get a more holistic view of what's there. In fact, how many of you have heard somebody who's a Bible teacher and they'll teach something and you think, that's erroneous or that's not quite right and you can just simply look at your cross-references and you start to read other verses that your Bible has talked about and you go, man, they didn't even look, they didn't think, they didn't try. The televangelists are kind of infamous for that, where they'll take one verse, take it out of context, and you're like, if you had just read anywhere else, you know, you wouldn't have said that out loud with a serious look on your face. That reminds me of Creflo Dollar, who's a famous televangelist, who recently, speaking of airplanes and my earlier analogy, has gotten in trouble because he said that the Lord really wants him to have a $65 million private jet. I don't know where you could prove that from the text of scripture, personally, but that could just be me. Maybe Holly Hills needs a private jet. Not so much. You're not convinced of that, okay. Okay, so just quickly for the sake of developing through this list here, and we're not going to look at all of these Bible verses, but we'll look at some of them.

Who compiled the first five books of the Bible? Moses compiled the first five books of the Bible. So that is an established collection of the early Hebrew scriptures, the Pentateuch, the first five books. And after that, all of All of these books tend to look back specifically mentioning Moses' writings.

And then some of those things then compound and talk about other writings that expand outside of that. So let's take a look just right after the Pentateuch. Let's take a look at Judges 3-4 real quick. And we're just going to look at this to prove it out. Sometimes it's nice to, as a Bible teacher, just say, it's the student's job to look up the Bible verses, and you can look at it later. But then if I have a typo, then nobody ever finds it until later on, and then it's embarrassing. So we'll take a look and see how wrong I am. I'm just kidding.

So Judges 3-8. See? Judges 3-4. That's even a good part. for testing Israel to find out if they would obey the commandments of the Lord which he had commanded their fathers through Moses. So we see here early in the nation of Israel's being separate from Moses and Joshua. They've already screwed up. They're there for testing. But they're pointing back again to a known codified set of writings.

And whose writings were they, according to this text? They were Moses's, but they were the commandments from the Lord. It wasn't just Moses's writings, it was the commandments from the Lord that Moses was the bearer of. We're going to kind of see that there's a theme of that, that even though it's human language, that the ownership of the message is from God.

And that's an important principle that we will see repeated throughout this. I'm going to skip forward to 1 Kings 8, 53 through 56. I don't know why, but ever since I was a teenager, I've always been thrilled when there's a book of the Bible that has a chapter that's longer than about 30 verses. I'm like, wow! Why did they not break that into a smaller section? I don't know. Because it was random human division, but they're like, no, this one needs to be longer. So 53 through 56. Actually, let's say 53. I divided that. Should have been 54.

When Solomon had finished praying this entire prayer and supplication to the Lord, he arose from before the altar of the Lord from kneeling on his knees with his hands spread toward heaven. and he stood and blessed all the assembly of Israel with a loud voice saying blessed be the Lord who has given rest to his people Israel according to all that he promised not one word has failed of all his good promise which he promised through Moses his servant so here's Solomon Okay, so we're after David, but here's Solomon who is writing and he's pointing back again to those texts. There was known and he's talking about the Lord.

And what's the attribute of the Lord in this? What's the characteristic of God? Is he flaky? He's faithful. He's faithful to his promises and the characteristics of God in maintaining that. One of the important things in the inerrancy of God is if God has other characteristics that are questionable, we don't... who cares about the errancy? If we're following God and we've got to figure out all these other characteristics, then it becomes its own other mystery, right? But God's faithfulness and the consistency of His character is there.

Let's go to Psalm 103.7.

And the reason why I'm... I'm not trying to belabor this point, but the reason why I'm going through this is I want to make sure that we have an understanding of the consistency throughout the scriptures that it's there. It's not just a few places. It's throughout it entirely.

Psalm 103, 7, He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the sons of Israel. Then in 8, The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness. And of course it keeps going on with the attributes of God. But the thing is that There's a faithfulness and a reliability and a consistency that's there, but it keeps pointing back to this revelation that's there as a foundation. So when we talk about later, and we'll get to the issue of the creation account, who recorded the creation account? Moses. So if everybody else is leaning on Moses, it really matters that Moses has a correct or properly bound understanding.

Let's scoot forward to Matthew 5.18. After this we'll only have one more, I promise you. You will not have to get blisters on your fingers from this class. I know, we don't normally flip this many times, right?

So Matthew 5.18.

This is Christ speaking, for truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished. And then in 19, of course, this is where the legalists get confused in the church and why my dad went over this in the legalism series that we did a while back. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. And of course, that's Christ speaking to the Jews, right? So that's not an affirmation for us to be under the law. But who is Christ pointing to? He's pointing to the law. He's pointing to Moses. He's pointing to this with consistency.

And last, but certainly not least, probably a Bible passage that you would expect in a series of verses talking about the Scriptures, 2 Timothy 3.16. We'll read 17 too, because it's always the right thing to do. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. And what scripture is that? When Paul writes about that in the New Testament, he's talking about the Old Testament scriptures. But he speaks about them as a whole body, a whole corpus, the canon of the Old Testament.

And that's an important thing that we see, that there's a consistency and a reliability and an attitude of faithfulness even within the text itself. So, internal consistency is important. The other thing that's part of this subsection here is talking about the historicity of the book. And we had a whole couple of lessons that talked about the historicity, so I'm not going to go into that because That's why we had lessons, and even those were short and truncated, right? And next week we'll start into the archaeology of the Old Testament and the New Testament. So we've already gone over that some, and we're going to go into detail on that. So we won't hit that too much, other than to say that the Bible is one of the most historically revelatory documents that we have that archaeologists go back and check things and research things and compare it to the scriptures.

It's not like there's these massive gaps where, like, you know, hey, this Jericho thing That seems like there might be evidence of it. And they're like, we don't even know where Jericho is. That would be like a big gap. That's not a problem. And I'm not picking that as a straw man argument.

I'm just saying it's one of many examples of where we can go and we can read in the text, this happened, and there's a place to go with it where we can research it. And they're finding new tells and new sites and places where more and more of these things corroborate. But the historicity of the text is also important. If there was a bunch of gaps, we'd start to wonder, right?

We'd say, huh, there's a lot of disconnects. I always hate to pick on the Mormons ahead of time, because we're going to have a whole class where we're just going to pick on them alone, right? But I hate to pick on the Mormons, but when you look at the Book of Mormon and you see there's supposed to be all these archaeological or historical things that took place, there is no archaeology to prove it. And I asked a Mormon missionary, well, I've asked multiple Mormon missionaries, but one particular time I'm recalling, I asked him, I said, where did this stuff happen? Because when I go to the Bible, I can say, well, this happened here, and we can go try to find it, and we have a general idea of the geography of where these events took place. Where did the events in the Book of Mormon take place?

And he said, well, we don't really know. Well, do you have any archaeological evidence? Well, we found some ruins from Indian tribes. Well, where? Would that be like a clue? And they're like, well, we don't really know for sure if it's... And just there was nothing. There was no historical connection, which to me seems like a big problem.

Oh, hey, you might want to have your faith in something that isn't just as they call the burning in your bosom, where you feel warm and fuzzies. Warm and fuzzy is great, but that can be trumped up. You can make that happen yourself. So definitely a problem. Another thing that I think is part of the internal consistency is the prophecy. When we take the prophecy, the single prophecy, there's only one prophecy in the Bible, prophecies as a whole in the Bible, when a prophecy takes place, there's a recording of the fulfillment, right?

Like when we talk about the Savior, the Messiah, which we desperately find out we need in the beginning of Genesis, Genesis 3.15 is the first, but not the only prophecy of a coming Messiah. So now we have this issue of God's promised something, God said something's gonna happen, and then he has to fulfill it.

And we've already read where he's faithful to his promises, but how many of you have a study Bible where it'll have a star when a prophecy is in there, and then it'll be a filled-in star? Some of the Bibles have that as cross-references. Some of you may have it and you don't even know because you didn't know it was in there. But when you start to read through the New Testament, there's a bunch of black filled-in stars because all these prophecies about what was going on with Christ were becoming real.

Unfortunately, during the last couple decades, we've had a real resurgence of amillennial thinking where they don't take a literal view of prophecy in the book of Revelation, for example, and so they don't tend to emphasize those prophecies as much, but those will be fulfilled too in a literal way. And so we can understand as we take a look at internal consistency, we can see that the prophecy was given and the prophecy was fulfilled, and it wasn't done under a rock. Well, it was when Christ was resurrected, I guess, on a rock temporarily, and then they rolled it away, right?

But the things that happened were very public. So if you have this confirmation of things and it's public, that's kind of a big deal, right? Versus the idea of a secret promise with a secret fulfillment. That's no good. So part of that, with the internal consistency and the historicity and then the prophetic things, all of that comes together to tell a compelling story of inerrancy within the internal context of the scriptures. Any questions about internal consistency or historicity?

All right. No hands for that one. Well, let's take a look at some of the skeptics' arguments and take a look at that. I'm kind of addressing some of these things. Now, first of all, entire books have been written about this, so I'm not going to pretend in a short subsection of a class to address every possible question. There are pretty solid books that are out there, and I have some that I've used.

My dad may have recommendations for what he's used. You've been doing a lot more of working with people apologetically recently over the internet with a telephone, whereas I have not spent my energies on the internet doing that. I just build it. I build the internet for a living and he's using it for a living, so it's good.

But the thing is that there's good books on difficulties in the Bible. We're going to look at some of these questions But by no means is this a complete review of things. So if you have questions or things that you're curious about, you can ask them.

I may not know the answer. My dad may have some answers. But I have never run into anything as I've studied where I've had questions where I've been, oh, I found the missing link. I found the chink in the armor. I found the thing that we can't answer this. There's pretty solid answers.

And before we get into it, I want to point out one of the key things is understanding hermeneutics. In this class, we've brought up hermeneutics before, but on the Holly Hills website, there are several hermeneutics classes that have been recorded and put up there for you to listen to. Hermeneutics is the discussion of how to study the Bible to get a consistent understanding of what's there. One of the key things in hermeneutics is context.

So when you hear people attacking the Bible, often they'll take one verse out of context and they'll say, see? And it's like, that's not fair to just take one thing out of context and say, I win. If you did that in a court of law, they'd shut you down real fast. But for some reason, if you can do that with one verse in the Bible, you're a theologian. So with that, as a preface, let's dig into here. And the first sentence here is important.

The Bible is God's word. It uses human words, right? It uses human language, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek being the predominant ones. It uses human language to communicate God's revealed message. So we want to make sure that that's our starting point in understanding dealing with issues with the Bible and the accuracy of the text itself. So the skeptics will often come and say the Bible is in man's words and therefore it's man's book.

It's not God's book. Their assumption, the underlying assumption that that statement makes, is that God would have his own language, and he would speak to man in God's language, and we'd have to cope with translating from God's language to man's language. What's the next assumption underneath that? What's the assumption behind that? Is language from man, or is language from God?

If we look at the beginning creation account. We see that Adam has this innate ability to communicate with God right off. He wanted a relationship with man and he didn't say, OK, great, now invent a language so I can talk to you. We don't find that account, at least. If that happened, we don't know about it through revelation. Instead, we find God made man and instantly communicated with him.

Now, the thing I love about that language is that it was simple enough that Adam felt like he could expand it in naming and take the language and expand it. Communication was quickly added to, had a greater vocabulary, and that's kind of a cool concept. But language is there.

We don't want to buy into the assumption of that position, though, that language is something that immediately weakens the message. You could expand that and say that the same thing happened with Taurus now. Because when he changed all the different languages, they didn't have to all go through the language school so that they could understand each other. Yeah.

God created those languages and they knew them inherently, which is fascinating. They knew the languages inherently and in subgroups. And that's actually a problem that we face today. still is that language has created subgroups and sub-barriers. It hinders technology. It hinders all the things that God used language to hinder before. It's still there. If there's no translator, no one interpreting what's being said, then there's a big gap. So, the last sentence of that first paragraph in the section is, the Bible being God's message means it is subject to the restraints of God's character and qualities, or the constraints of God's characters and qualities. Well, what are God's characters and qualities? Is he faithful? Is he righteous? Is he loving? Is he merciful?

I mean, we can go through the characteristics of God. He's all-knowing. If he's all-knowing, That also means that he knows how to use language to communicate to us. That seems like an important core tenet, but the skeptic assumes the lowest possible quality for God, period, and then extrapolates from there. If you've got a false premise, you can, as we stated before, if you have a false premise, you can still reason your way from that false premise to a whole lot of other false premises. So language is important, but it's inside the context of God's character. So one of the things, and this next paragraph focuses on this, is the importance of understanding that God's communication and revelation capabilities were perfect, and they were perfectly communicated in the original writings of the text.

That is the letter, or as some would say, the original copy. Although when you juxtapose it with the word copy, it sounds like it's not the original. But it's the first. It's your epistle. It's the one that Paul wrote and sent out. It's the one that Moses took and stored it away so that they could preserve it. It's the one that then got carried and passed down and carried and passed down. But it was God's intended message. It was God's putting that together. And it was without error. by nature of who God is, by nature of who He was.

Those original writings are called autographs sometimes, so when you see that, it's not like there's a famous person. I mean, God's famous, but that's not what we're doing, is looking for God's signature on a baseball or something like that. I have a baseball with some autographs on it, but it doesn't seem to be going up in value at all. Collectors aren't burning them and throwing them away, I guess. But the originals were perfectly formed and contained God's perfect ideas in them. The skeptic is going to try to attack that, and so we need to take a look at some considerations how they go about attacking that.

So how many of you have heard someone say that John wasn't written by John? The gospel of John wasn't written by John. Frankly, you could also talk about first, second, and third John. But what is often the skeptical position is to say, we don't know who wrote it, but we're sure it's not John. Anyone but John could have written it, right?

But that's an argument from silence. Remember, we talked about the argument of silence. The problem with the argument of silence is it's not an argument. It's an assumption. You're presuming something about the text. So when we presume that John isn't the author of John, then we have to figure out who it is. Anything you derive from after that is the assumption that it's not John, even though we have historical tradition and other internal evidences that indicate, hey, this probably was John. But again, that's their skeptical position. Now, that's with the originals. My dad has pointed out a few times that we have some fragments that we think might be originals of... Okay, which book is it? Not an original of any, but... Oh, I thought you said that we thought...

No, but the earliest one that we presently have is of the Gospel of John. And that fragment dates from about 125 A.D. And it is the finding and disclosure of that fragment that caused those people who thought that John was written about 170 or 180 A.D. to have to revise their theory. And a fragment of Mark dating from within the first century has been found The full study on it has not been released. They're still working on it.

OK. I misunderstood that. So so we have these early manuscripts, but there's not confidence that that's the original. For some reason, I misunderstood you on that. However, we have to deal with the issue of copies. OK, so we have copies of the text and we did some discussion of this earlier, but we're going to revisit it just briefly. How did the Hebrew scribes make their copies?

Does anybody remember? We went over that. Nobody? Stan? Meticulously, yeah. They had very systematic patterns to observe to make sure that the word counts were the same and that the middle word matched. And if there was an error, what did they do with the manuscript with the error on it? They burned it. No records. of the errors. That's the goal. The goal is no records, and that's the Hebrew Old Testament. With the Greek New Testament, there are actually way, way more copies of that that are earlier, but a lot of the differences have to do with swapping vowels and spelling variations.

How many of you have gone on Facebook and seen those memes, those pictures that people paste, where they'll have all these spelling errors inside the text, and yet you can still read it. And they talk about how researchers have actually done studies to see how people are able to take a text that is totally munged, it's just been terribly mutilated, and still understand it.

And that's not uncommon. So when we see these things where they'll say, ah, there's swapped vowels, like they changed an omega for an omicron or something like that, that's not an error in the text to the point where it's like, wow, this is radically different.

That's like, I had a typo. Nothing to panic about, right? The other thing that is something my dad mentioned would be the cultic texts where they changed, for example, the Samaritans changed the geographical location of the mountains so that they could have their own religious sect. But everything else matches up. And the last one here is clarification in later texts. So this is something actually we ran into at our Bible study on Tuesday nights two weeks ago.

And that was in Colossians 2.18. And I'm going to go there. Does somebody have a King James that they have? There's one in the pew, but I don't know if anybody has. Nobody here reads King James? New King James? All right. If someone, yeah, if you'll pull that out of the pew.

If you'll turn to Colossians 2.18, and whoever gets there first, go ahead and read out loud. Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking a stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind. And if you've got the King James there, if you'll read, that's the new King James? Yeah. Okay. Let no one defraud you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, introducing into intruding into those things which he has not seen, being puffed up by his fleshly mind. Alright, so how many of you heard the difference there? Did anybody hear the difference?

And it wasn't just the specific variations on synonyms. One of them says seen and one of them says not seen. The King James, which is based on a later set of manuscripts, has the word not inserted in there. Should we panic? Does it actually mean something different? And that's the thing that's interesting is that they both are saying the same thing about the vision. One of them has just got the inserted not in there to specify how fraudulent the vision is.

Did the doctrine of the verse change? The doctrine didn't change, the meaning of the verse didn't change, but there was one word that got added somewhere between the earliest copies that we have and the later copies that King James was translated from. Not massive doctrinal differences and not major we should panic sort of changes. It's a smaller nuance.

And using textual criticism, which is kind of the study of how to derive and deduce the best meaning of the earliest document, we can go back and say, okay, not probably doesn't belong there, but it doesn't radically modify the text and make me go, I can't believe this anymore. That's not the problem that comes from seeing that extra word there. Again, if you're using hermeneutics, if you're saying, how do I properly study this and how do I go through that? You look at it and you go, okay, there's a variant here.

But my meaning doesn't change. Somebody added that in there to try to clarify something and unfortunately it got copied. But that's a minor, minor change and it's one of a handful of places where that kind of thing has happened. It's not a big problem. Yeah. Let's see here. Was translated from predominantly later transcripts. Yeah.

The idea is that that the not was added. later on by someone who was doing copying and they thought they would put a note in. Because we have various copies throughout history where there's notes that are put in there and somebody copied a note. you see showing up, and that is that in our Bibles, if I write notes in my Bible, I can tell, and someone else can tell. Yeah, because it's not printed in the same font. Yeah, I don't have the handwritten, printed contrast, and so if someone copies something but makes their own personal note about something, the next person copying may be inclined to copy the notes. Yeah. It's all handwritten and they miss it. Brian's already gone up. He's going to he's going to ring the bell soon. We're only halfway through. I was worried I might run out of material before the class was over. It's not a problem.

But the last part of this section, which I think is just worth. reiterating is that the translations of the Bible are a bit more complicated. In Islam, it's very strongly encouraged that you learn Arabic so that you can read the original Quran. Because they're worried that you'll get some kind of error in the translation. I think it's pretty provable with our modern English translations that are word-for-word that we have a really tight coupling between the original language and the text that's there.

It's not something that we have to panic about. We're like, man, I don't even understand what's being said here. And if I just could understand the Greek, it would be so much more clear. I'm taking Greek. It's been really neat. I'm learning a lot. Abby loves the heck out of the class. She's smiling because she hates having to do the homework. Abby loves the class.

But as I'm learning the Greek, what's not shocking to me at all is that pretty much it says what my Bible already said in English. It's just that I can explain to you more about the technicalities of what's underpinning the language in the Greek. But it's not like the translation is terribly bad and, well, thank goodness I'm learning the Greek so I can get past this absolutely embarrassing English Bible. That's not the problem. So we don't find this deep amount of error introduced by translation. That's just not the case.

Then the next section here is talking about historical and scientific error. And the historicity we talked about briefly, and we're going to get into the archaeology in the next couple of classes. So I'm going to skip that for now just to say that we'll get into that, and I don't think you have anything to worry about. You don't have to take my word on it, but I think we'll have some good answers on the archaeology. the historicity is there and then there'll be a few attacks on scientific things there'll be a skeptical position I've heard or liberal position that'll say we can believe the Bible on matters of faith and the matters of morality but not on science and history Unfortunately, the problem with that is that science and history and faith and morality are all intertwined so tightly in the scriptures that you just can't do that.

Once you start pulling on that thread, the whole thing comes unwound. What happens, like we said, in Genesis, if the very first three books are myth? Well now, because of the literal sequence of the story, we have man made in God's image, and we have no death as a principle that's conveyed, and suddenly that's gone.

And then the fall happens, and death gets introduced. Well, that's really questionable. And so suddenly the whole thing unravels, and we don't need salvation. How do we know we need salvation? Well, it's just a myth. We have this guy who fell, and this gal that was with him, and it's just a myth. Well, if that's the case, then everything that builds out of that is fundamentally messed up. We have nothing that we can rely on, because the core of what is going to happen, and the need for a Savior, and the need for all of the things to play out, disappears.

Or let's say that's right for some reason, but the Noah story is a myth. All of these early things have to be reliable, or we have a big problem. Is that the first or the second bell? Sorry, that's the first one. Alright, good. I want to make sure I don't leave us stranded.

I want to jump ahead to the section you'll see on page four, God Changes His Mind? In Numbers 23.19 we find that God doesn't lie and He doesn't change His mind. We already read the Hebrews verse on that.

But then we move into Exodus 23.9-14 and we see God's interacting with Moses. So Exodus 23. I'm at 32, that'll never work. I'm sorry, Exodus 32. I was at the right place. Exodus 32, 9-14.

The Lord said to Moses, I have seen this people and behold they are an obstinate people. Now then, let me alone, that my anger may burn against them, and that I may destroy them, and I will make of you a great nation. Then Moses entreated the Lord his God and said, O Lord, why does your anger burn against your people whom you have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians speak saying, with evil intent he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth? Turn your burning anger and change your mind about doing harm to your people.

And then I'm going to skip ahead to 14 just for the sake of time since that was the second bell. So the Lord changed his mind about the harm which he said he would do to his people. And then Moses goes down the mountain. Here we have one verse that says God doesn't change His mind, and then another verse that says God changed His mind. And so we have an apparent contradiction. So, what is the difference between these two verses, and how do we reconcile this? And how do we do it quickly, because that was the second bell. How do we reconcile this?

I think it's more about Israel and about who Moses was than what God actually said. It's like a rhetorical statement. God already knew, so he's enveloping who Israel was at that time and what kind of people they were, and the humility of Moses, because a lot of people would jump at that and say, yeah, okay. My name will be famous.

Well, there's a number of things I've read about this, and it's obviously more than we have time to go over right now, but one of the things I think is powerful is that God's faithfulness in character is not in question. What's in question is, how do we understand this writing? And this is, in part, a human description of an experience of what God did.

But was God surprised by Moses' entreating? Oh no, he's asked me to change my mind. What do I do? Imagine God biting his proverbial fingernails, right? That's just not something that God's doing. Instead, God knows that Moses is going to entreat, and God says, okay, I'm going to do this. I will be faithful in these ways.

But what's the lesson that you walk away from this story? What's the lesson from the account? Not that God changed his mind, but that God was faithful. So what the skeptic says, ha ha, we found a chink in your armor, is actually a consistent telling of God's faithfulness.

God wasn't surprised by Moses in treatment. He wasn't surprised by Israel's sin, was he? He's not surprised when I sin. I'm sure of that. He's also not surprised when Israel sinned. The statement that is put out there is to get Moses to speak the truth and the principles. And it's said not because it's stating that God somehow flip-flopped, but rather to have Moses come about and express God's character. And Moses recognized God's character and it's recorded that way to prove God's character, not to discredit it.

We there was more that we could have gone over this morning obviously, but I think there's there's a good starting point here for us to begin understanding the Consistency and the truth that's revealed in scripture is not highly questionable But instead highly reliable and faithful and preserved and maintained and inerrant Let's let's close in prayer Heavenly Father we ask that you would just continue to impress upon us the truth of your word because of You are reliable and you are faithful and you preserve through your spirit the integrity of this revealed word that you've given to us.

We just ask that you would continue to allow us to be a light in the dark world who rejects this message. Lord, that you'd bring the lost to hear the gospel and respond to it. And that we would just be agents for your truth. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.