The Preservation of God's word
THE PRESERVATION OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES
Date: June 10, 2012
Scripture: Psalm 12:6-7
from the series Psalms for 2012
Introduction
Last time we examined The Characteristics Of The Successful Believer. We learned the blessed
truth that God literally “breathed” His Word through human
personalities to give us an inerrant, infallible and inspired record of His
revelation of Himself and of His Son the Lord Jesus Christ. I taught you already the steps knowing the mind of God.I
do not wish to be repetitive, but I do feel that we need to review a few of the
terms we encountered in our study.
·
Revelation - The process by which man heard
from God exactly what God wanted written down.
·
Inspiration - The process of man actually
writing down what God wanted said. This
is God filtering His Word through human personality.
·
Illumination - The process by which God uses the
inspired record of the revelation of Himself to speak to the hearts of
humanity.
To
this list, I would like to add the word Preservation. This is the process by which God has supernaturally
protected His word through many reproductions and translations. The idea of preservation holds that God has
faithfully superintended His Word down through the ages, so that even today,
some 3,500 years after portions of the Bible were written down, we can say that
what we possess, what we love and what we read are the very words of God!
Scripture
Let us together read Psalm 12:6-7.
6 The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.7 Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
This is the word of God. Thanks be to God. May the sweet Spirit add His blessing to our text this Morning... Amen!
Sermon
Now,
we have already discovered the tremendous truth that the original autographs,
that is, the writings of the original authors were divinely inspired. Sadly, none of those original autographs have
survived to this day. In other words,
you can’t go anywhere in this world and find a scrap of paper containing the
actual writings of Paul, John, Moses, Peter, James, Daniel, Isaiah or any of
the other biblical writers. Since that
is true, how can we be confident that the Bibles we possess today are in fact
accurate and are the very Word of God?
Just as the inspiration of the Scriptures can be decisively proven using
both the internal evidence of the Bible itself and the external sources of
historical and scientific evidence, it can also be proven that the Bible has
been divinely preserved down to this very day.
With that in mind, let’s take some time this morning to examine this
issue of The Preservation Of The Holy Scriptures.
I. SCRIPTURE HAS BEEN PRESERVED BY GOD’S PROMISES
(Ill. Let’s examine the internal evidence
from the Bible itself. The Bible
contains several passages that affirm God’s intention to preserve His inspired
Word for all generations.)
A. Old
Testament Promises Of Preservation
·
Psalm 12:6-7, “The words of the Lord are pure
words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. [7] Thou
shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for
ever.”
·
Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that he should
lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he
not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?”
·
Psalm 89:34, “My covenant will I not break, nor
alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.”
·
Isaiah 40:8, “The grass withereth, the flower
fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”
·
Psalm 119:89, “For ever, O Lord, thy word is
settled in heaven.”
B. New
Testament Promises Of Preservation
·
Matthew 5:18, “For verily I say unto you, Till
heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the
law, till all be fulfilled.”
·
Matthew 24:35, “Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but my words shall not pass away.”
·
Titus 1:2, “In hope of eternal life, which
God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;”
·
1 Peter 1:25, “But the word of the Lord endureth
for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.”
C.
To my mind, the conclusion from these verses is crystal clear: God had
indeed promised to preserve His Word!
The internal evidence is overwhelming!
I have given you nine passages that explicitly state God’s intentions in
this matter.
The
question I have for you is this: How many times does God have to say anything
before we can conclude that He means it?
Once! We have the promise of God,
Who cannot lie, Heb. 6:18, Who
identifies Himself as the “Faithful and True Witness”, Rev. 3:14, that He will forever
perfectly preserve His Word, and that is good enough for me. However, while that may be all the evidence
Bible believers need, that is not all the evidence we have!
II.
SCRIPTURE HAS BEEN PRESERVED
BY GOD’S POWER
A.
Jeremiah 36:1-32 tells the
story of God giving Jeremiah revelation and inspiration to write a portion of
the Word of God. Jeremiah writes as he
is commanded and king Jehoiakim listens to the word of God. He receives illumination fro the Lord, but he
rejects the message. He takes the scroll
Jeremiah has written and he literally cuts it to pieces and burns it in the
fireplace, Jer. 36:23. Apparently, he thinks that destroying the
written word will erase what God has said.
However, God’s word is settled, not on earth, but in Heaven, Psa. 119:89. God merely sent His word again through the
prophet Jeremiah, Jer. 36:28. Despite the actions of Jehoiakim, God
preserved His Word!
That
is just one small picture of what God has always done in regard to protecting
and preserving His Word down through the ages.
B.
Down through the ages, there have been several concerted efforts by
pagan unbelievers to eradicate the Word of God.
·
In
A.D. 303, the Roman emperor Diocletion ordered the confiscation and destruction
of all the Christian scriptures.
Thousands of early copies and possibly some original autographs were
burned. However, the Word of God was not
eradicated! Earnest believers protected
the Word and hid it away in the catacombs, in caves and in graves. Thus the Word of God survived that attack!
·
The
French humanist Voltaire once said, "Another century and there will not be a
Bible on the earth." Two centuries have gone, and the circulation
of the Bible is one of the marvels of the age. After he died, his old printing
press and the very house where he lived was purchased by the Geneva Bible
Society and made a depot for Bibles. On December 24, 1933, the British
Government bought a book called Codex Sinaiticus from the Russians for half a
million dollars. On the same day, a first edition of Voltaire's work sold for
eleven cents in Paris
bookshops.
·
Joseph
Stalin This bloody butcher took over all of Russia upon the death of Lenin in
the late twenties. From this point on until his death in the fifties, Stalin
instituted a "ban the Bible" purge from the U.S.S.R. such as had never
been witnessed before. The miserable man literally attempted to wipe the Word
of God and the God of the Word from the Russian people’s minds. Did he succeed?
A recent poll taken in Russia
shows that today more people than ever believe in God and His Word.
·
For
thousands of years the enemies of truth have sought to destroy the precious
Word of God. Every attempt to do so has
failed miserably as the Bible continues to be read and loved by millions of
people.
C.
In 1526, William Tyndale had produced the first English translation of
the Bible to be printed on a printing press.
This new version was hated by the Roman Catholic Church and in
particularly by the Bishop of London. A certain man named John Packington, who
knew the Bishop and his hatred of the Tyndale translation, but who was also
secretly a friend of Tyndale, went to the Bishop of London and told him he knew
how to get all of Tyndale’s Bibles. The
Bishop told him to get them and that he would gladly pay whatever they
cost. The Bishop of London promised to
buy them wit the intention of burning them a Paul’s Cross Cathedral in London. Packington when to Tyndale and told him of
the deal he had made with the Bishop.
Tyndale responded by saying that he knew the Bishop would burn his
Bibles. However, printing the Bibles had
left Tyndale deeply indebted.
Tyndale
decided to sell the Bibles to the Bishop of London. He saw several advantages in doing so. First, he could use the money to pay his way
out of debt and have even more Bibles printed.
Secondly, when the people of England saw the Bishop of London
burning the Word of God they would be come enraged. So, the enemy of the Word of God actually
allowed Tyndale to pay off his debts, correct the text of his translation and
print three times the number of Bibles that had been destroyed!
Later, when some of Tyndale’s
associates were arrested and asked where they received the money to print their
Bibles, they answered that the money came from the Bishop of London. This one instance is proof that God is able
to preserve His Word despite the attempts of all its enemies to destroy it.
III. SCRIPTURE
HAS BEEN PRESERVED BY GOD’S PROVIDENCE
(Ill. Despite the fact that God promised to
preserve His Word and that He has exerted His divine power to preserve His
Word, there still may be some doubt in a few minds about whether or not we have
an accurate record of God’s inspired in our hands today. Well, we do not have the time needed this
evening to examine all the evidence that exists for the preservation of the
inspired Word of God, but we do have time to look at a small portion of the
evidence that exists.)
(Note: Let me say first of all that the Old Testament text
has never really been questioned at to its authenticity. The Jewish scribes were faithful copyists of
the divine text. You may have heard of
all the extensive efforts they went to in order to ensure that their copies
matched the originals in every detail.
They actually had men whose only job was to count the letters in the
copies. They counted the “jots
and tittles”, Matt. 5:18, or
the “little
horns” that formed parts of the letters themselves. If the number of
letters, of jots and tittles, did not match the number in the original, the
copy was destroyed! If there was even
one error, no matter how small in the text, the copy was destroyed and the
copyist started over. These Jewish
scribes were so faithful to the Word of God when they came to the name of God,
they would wash themselves, and get a new pen before they wrote God’s name. Then they would discard that pen and use
another to proceed. Due to their
meticulous care of and reverence for the Old Testament Scriptures, the Hebrew
text, called the Masoretic text, has never been questioned!)
The
issue we face is related to the New Testament.
The question is this: can we, with confidence, really say that we have a
copy of the inspired word of God? Let’s
take a moment to examine the evidence. Every English Bible in existence today
came from one of two streams of Greek texts.
One stream is called the Alexandrian Text, while the other is called the
Byzantine Text. The Byzantine Text has
come to be known as the Majority Text or the Textus Receptus (The
Received Text). There is no way,
in the time we have allotted, that we can examine all the nuances of each
textual line. However, we can look a
couple of astounding particulars that should help the issue to become clear.
A.
The Perversion Of The True
Text - (The Alexandrian Text)
- This text family receives its name from the fact that it originated in Alexandria Egypt. It was the work of such early church fathers
and Clement and Origin. Both of these
men are held in high esteem by biblical scholars, but it should be noted that
both of these men rejected a literal interpretation of the Bible, leaning
instead toward an allegorical interpretation.
This simply means that they believed the Bible was a collection of
spiritual stories designed to teach truth.
Much could be said about these men, but it is enough to know, for now,
that they did not accept the Bible as it was literally written. This fact alone makes the texts that they had
a hand in creating suspect.
This
family of texts rests on about 45 manuscripts, many of which are very ancient,
some dating back to around 330 AD. The
two primary texts in this family are called Sinaiticus (Codex
Aleph) and Vaticanus (Codex B). These are the oldest known manuscripts in
existence. Both date from the 4th
Century. Codex Aleph was discovered in
the 1840's at a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai
by a man named Count Constantin von Tischendorf. He saw several old leaves from
ancient books in a pile to be used to start fires in the kitchen. Upon inquiry, he discovered that they had an
even older book in the monastery. The monks then showed him the manuscript
known as Sinaiticus. This ancient manuscript
contains over 12,000 corrections and revisions by someone other that the
original copyist. It also contains
several spurious books such as The Shepherd of Hermes, The Gospel of Thomas and
the Didache. All of these books have
been rejected by the believing church for nearly 2,000 years.
Codex
B was discovered in the Vatican library in
1481. It too, dates from the 4th Century.
This manuscript is the one most relied on by modern Bible translators. This
codex has been heavily corrected by Roman Catholic copyists. By the way, the King James Translators knew
of the existence of Codex B, but chose to avoid it.
What
is interesting is that these two manuscripts, which form the basis for all
modern versions of the Bible, disagree with one another over 3,000 times
in just the four Gospels alone!
There are 43 other manuscripts that support this textual family. Remember, every new version of the Bible,
with the exception of the NKJV (It gets its footnotes from the Alexandrian line
of texts), was translated from Greek texts based on these manuscripts. A whopping total of 45 manuscripts stand
behind all the new versions of the Bible.
These
texts were taken, translated, collated and come to us today in the form of the Nestles-Aland
27th Greek Text. This
text is considered the standard by most Bible scholars. Yet, it still only rests on some 45
manuscripts!
B.
The Preservation Of The True
Text – (The Traditional Text)
- The other text family had its origin in the city of Antioch
in Syria. The scholars in Antioch took a more literal approach to
biblical interpretation. They considered
the Bible to be more than mere allegory; they believed it to be the very Word
of God. As a result, they were diligent in seeing to it that they were faithful
to copy it correctly, employing many of the same techniques of their Jewish
predecessors. It is this textual line
that has given the world many of the great Bible translations: The
Erasmus Greek Text, 1522 (Later to become known at as The Textus
Receptus, 1633); Martin Luther’s German Bible, circa 1530; Tyndales Bible, 1522; Coverdales
Bible, 1535; The Geneva Bible, 1560 and the King
James Bible, 1611.
While
the new versions rest on a total of 45 manuscripts, those versions that were
translated from the Majority Text rest on over 5,210 manuscripts! The overwhelming number of manuscripts agrees
with the Majority Text. By the way, when
the Nestles-Aland 27th Text is compared to The Textus Receptus, you
find that there are some 3,000 words omitted in the Nestles-Aland text and some
20 verses are also omitted. Among the
verses omitted are: Acts 8:37 and 1 John 5:7.
C.
This is astounding when you consider that Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which
was written in 52 BC has only 9 good manuscripts supporting it and the oldest
dates from some 900 years after the time of Caesar! The Iliad by Homer was written in 900 BC.
There are only 643 copies. The earliest copy was made about 400 BC. The textual
tradition of the Iliad ranks a distant second to the NT tradition when you
consider MSS numbers, age of documents, and quality of texts. Tacitus was a
Roman who lived from about AD 55-117. His two long works are Histories and
Annals. Only four and one-half of the fourteen books of Histories survive,
while only ten of the sixteen books and two partial books of Annals survive.
The text for both depends on one ninth century MSS and one eleventh century
MSS.
D.
When you total it all up, the New Testament rests on over 86,000
fragment and manuscripts. There is more
evidence for the accuracy of the New Testament than there is for any ancient
writing, period! Do we have the Word of God?
Absolutely!
E.
While the Majority Text has much more evidence in its favor against the
Alexandrian Text, some would argue that the Alexandrian texts are older, and
therefore they are more reliable. Well,
older is not always better!
The
simple explanation as to why more early manuscripts from the Alexandrian line
exist is that the Majority texts were worn out through use. The fact that many, many more copies of this
line exist is proof positive that it was favored by the ancient church over the
Alexandrian line of manuscripts.
Final Challange
I have merely scratched the surface of this matter of the preservation
of the biblical text. However, I hope
you can walk away this evening confident of the fact that you hold in your
hands, and hopefully in your hearts, the very Word of God. By the way, don’t let it bother you that the
two lines of texts seem to be so different.
When all the manuscripts are collated and laid along side the Majority
Text, they are found to be in agreement 98% of the time! Of the 2% that disagrees, most is trivial in
nature.
The
bottom line is this: of all the manuscripts in existent of all variations, the
difference between them that could be called “substantive” is a mere 1/10th
of 1 percent! That is a
total agreement among all the textual lines of 99.9%!
If
the two textual lines are in fact so close, then does it matter which version
you use today? I think it does! The overwhelming majority of the evidence
rests in the corner of the Majority Text and thus in the King James
Version. For me the argument has been forever
settled! The new versions may contain
the Word of God in so far as they are accurately translated, while the King James
Version is the Word of God!
I
close with this question: has God perfectly preserved His word to
this day? All the evidence says
He has! Therefore, read your Bible with
confidence. Base your life upon it with
assurance. It is the preserved and inspired
Word of God! God has superintended His
word through thousands of translations and copies. He has never re-inspired the Bible, some
think He did in 1611. He never
re-inspired it, but He has preserved His Word and He has preserved it in its
inspired, infallible and inerrant form!
Blessed be His Holy name!
Would you mind reading and meditating it all the days of your life?
Have you read your Bible Today? or you just preserved your Bible in a
cupboard? Any confession you need to make about your Bible reading
Please come forward We will minister to you. As the songs continues we
will pray together.
--
The Rev. Lenin Kumar
The Potter's Home International Church
The Christian Living
Theology Character Fire
www.pottershomeinternational.org
www.pottershomeinternational.org
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