DEFENDING THE INDISPENSABLE WORD OF GOD By
David Norris
As the believer turns over the pages of his Bible, reads it line by line, word by word, he expects to be reading the very words of the Holy Ghost. His attitude towards what he reads is no different than were those same words carried to him audibly by God speaking to him from heaven. It is therefore not helpful to be told that, in fact, only the words the apostles and prophets actually wrote down were God-breathed and that these are now lost. Strictly speaking, we cannot really know in every detail what these men wrote. This is worrying. The believer is then told that there are lots of different manuscripts not all saying precisely the same thing, although they largely agree. Indeed, the text from which the Bible is now generally translated has been cobbled together from these manuscripts by apostate scholars. There is now a distinct loss of confidence, but it gets worse. We are next told that it is quite impossible to translate perfectly; after all, translators are only human and mistakes are inevitable even in the revered Authorised Version - and this we are told by those who use it! The conclusion must then be that no version, no translation, no Bible we are able to read is word for word the inspired Word of God and there are also some doubts about the Hebrew and Greek. Someone then continues, it is not the individual words that God inspired but the meaning behind the words. Now that is all very strange, how can there be any meaning without any words? So it is that step by step the believer’s faith in an objective, authoritative Word is disturbed. Any suggestions that undermine the believer’s trust and confidence in the Word of God must be rejected. The confidence he once had ebbs and so, using this translation or that, he tends to rely on his own thoughts and feelings more and more, or in a worst case scenario finds his faith all but gone. An argument that moves progressively away from confidence and faith in the Word God has given us is not one that has come from heaven, but is inspired by the enemy of souls. We need an objective Word, authoritative, a Word that does not change with our feelings or our mood, that is the same whenever we read it.
We need God’s Word even to begin to understand the world in which we live; moreover, we need it if we are to be saved and live a life pleasing to our heavenly Father. We must hold fast to a verbally inspired, reliable, and authentic Word of God in the English language. This we have in our Authorised Version. Anything less than this is inadequate. We need to have complete confidence that every word we are reading has come from God and carries His authority, nothing less will do. We find that many, of whom we would have expected better things, express
confidence in the Authorised Version, nevertheless, they suggest in the next breath
that it is something less than entirely the inspired Word of God. The Authorised
Version is virtually, but not quite, the perfect Word of God. It is superior to
other versions, but not without error. As most believers will read the Bible in
their own language, they are thus denied access to a completely trustworthy copy
of the Scriptures. This is a totally inadequate and unacceptable state of affairs.
1 A WORK OF GOD OR OF MAN? This brings us to the heart of the debate: to what extent is the Bible we read the work of man and to what extent is it the work of God? Is only the initial inspiration the work of God and are the copies and translations thereafter largely the work of man? Do we have the authentic Scriptures only in the original languages or are they available to us in our own language? Do we have before us the word of man or the Word of God? Is our English Bible wholly the work of man, wholly the work of God, or is it a mixture of both? These are important questions, for if my Bible is in any part the work of man, then how can I ever really be sure that what I am reading at any given point has come from God or from man? Shall I rely on scholars to tell me? It will be argued, as it is with respect to differences in the Greek text, that no discrepancies in our English Bible affect any major doctrine - but how can we know that? Often meaning will depend upon a single word. If our Bible cannot be relied upon in one place, it cannot be relied upon in another. First, there are those who tell us that the Bible is completely human with no divine element at all. This view we reject unequivocally. These are the views of unbelievers, who may see the Bible as a remarkable, but thoroughly human book. They will subject the Scriptures to the kind of textual criticism that they apply to the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, or any other writers for whom they consider it worth their while to establish an authentic text of their works. They will readily acknowledge that the Christian Scriptures have a particularly advantageous position because there is far more consistent manuscript evidence with which to work by comparison with secular literature of similar age. Second, at the other end of the spectrum, as Bible believers, we believe the Bible to be God-breathed. Let us be clear in our mind as to what we mean by this - “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). The following, taken from the writings of the Puritan, John Owen (1616-1683), is probably one of the best definitions of divine inspiration outside holy writ.
This view constitutes a shift away from the traditional view espoused by earlier theologians such as R. L. Dabney in the USA, or John Owen in England, or Francis Turretin of Geneva, and as such it is a novelty of recent origin. To suggest this newer view, promulgated initially by A. A. Hodge and Benjamin Warfield at Princeton, is the traditional one is disingenuous and misleading. Another view claims that inspiration has not been lost in the existing copies of the originals, or apographs, but that translations must of necessity be the work of men and therefore fallible and open to correction. This appears to have been the view held by Francis Turretin of Geneva (1623-87). Those sharing Turretin’s views on versions and translations today would do well to remember that he was primarily com-bating the papists’ insistence that the Latin Vulgate, the translation of Jerome, was definitive. In seeking to assert its final authority in all such matters, Rome insisted that the original language manuscripts had been corrupted, particularly We further believe that inspiration is not impaired in the process of copying the original autographs, nor in translation, when these tasks are carried out in humble dependence upon God and by the call and guidance of the Holy Spirit. A translation of the Bible is simply the same Word of God in a language other than that in which it was originally written. If theos is the word that God gave in Greek, then God, Dieu, Gott, are precisely the same, nothing has changed, but the several words are understood by those whose language is English, French, and German respectively. This is not to say that translation is simply a matter of swapping words! As anyone knows who has tried it, even at school, a good translation demands enormous skill and language knowledge, themselves gifts of God. We affirm that those parts of the work of bringing us the Scriptures in our own tongue involving the active participation of men are so protected by the providence of God as to ensure the transmission of divine revelation without error. Language itself, we assert, is a gift of God given above all to the end that we might learn of God, the way of salvation, and be instructed in our most holy faith. We believe God has given us His authentic Word in our own language. We do not deny that blemishes may have crept into reliable manuscripts through age or the oversight of copyists, nor the possibility of such things as printer’s errors in our own or earlier copies of the Bible. Nor do we deny that from time to time changes to the spelling, even the up-dating of some grammatical structures, none of which will remotely change the original meaning carried by those words, may occasionally be necessary in some translations. Such changes were successfully made to our 1611 Author-ised Version on several occasions and do not thereby make it less a verbally inspired book. Similar work on other translations could profitably be carried out by godly men suitably conversant with the relevant languages and equip-ped by God for such an undertaking, as for example on the German translation made by Martin Luther in collaboration with his colleagues. Third, there are many positions taken up between these two, but all involve at heart the same question as to the extent to which our Bible is deemed to be a human book and how much it is divine in origin. The common view among evangelicals still holding to some view of verbal inspiration is likely to be that popularised by Benjamin Warfield (1851-1921). This view holds that the original autographs only were inspired and that it is the work of scholars to engage in textual criticism, as would be carried out on secular texts, in order to reconstruct the original inspired text. The problem with this view is that the result of such work can at best still only be a never-ending work of approximation as we do not have the originals with which to make a comparison. Did we have the originals, then of course, such work would be unnecessary anyway. However few the discrepancies might be, we are still left with a Bible that is in part the work of man and so is uncertain and not entirely reliable. by the Jews, and ought therefore to be corrected by the Latin of Jerome. This view of the Vulgate he rightly disputed and he also contested the infallibility of other translations of the day. Owen too encountered this problem, speaking of the use of translations he wrote:
That which the prophets and apostles wrote is found today in copies preserved by God from which nothing has been lost of His Word and these copies are to be the standard by which we recognise the authenticity of any translation, this was Owen’s view. Our own Authorised Version was translated from the Word of God perfectly preserved in copies of the originals given in Hebrew and Greek, at the same time comparing the work previously undertaken by Tyndale. These same authentic apographs should be the starting point for translating the Bible into any language, along with comparisons made with the work done by others such as the Authorised Version. Owen’s remarks about translations and versions must also be placed in their historical context, if they are to be properly understood. It is not the 1611 Authorised Version which he has primarily in mind and to which he makes no direct reference, although as a ‘modern’ translation of his day he would have included it within his wider general rules. It had appeared five years prior to his birth and he would have known it; though doubtless, because of his familiarity with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, he would have used the original text most frequently and perhaps the Geneva Bible in English. He refers in the main to those versions such as the Septuagint (or LXX), the Greek translation of the Old Testament made about three hundred years before the coming of the Lord Jesus and which he regarded as being full of errors, or the Syriac translation, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and others, all of which he viewed as being irreparably corrupt, but were being used by enemies of the Gospel to cast doubt on the reliability of the original texts. Their argument was that as the compilers and translators of these various versions would have had access to texts no longer available, the extant originals ought to be corrected using these versions. This he vigorously refutes. Those who believe translations must of necessity be less than the Word of God ought not to seek refuge in the above quotation from John Owen. Let us note with care that whilst he believed it possible for a translation to be imperfect or corrupt, far more significant, Owen believed it possible for a translation to be the perfect Word of God in as much as it conformed to the originals; in other words, to that which God gave to Scripture writers and He has preserved intact. For John Owen the relationship between the original text and the translation was one of precedent. A son does not precede his father, but this does not make him any the less his own flesh and blood. He is his father’s son, and as such distinct, but to the extent that he carries his father’s attributes, nature, and physical characteristics, the source from which the son has sprung may be clearly seen. In the case of Scripture, the translation can and, in the case of the Authorised Version, does perfectly replicate that which prophets and apostles wrote under divine inspiration. We believe we still have the Word of God today in its purity and perfection, free from error, and we have it in the English language in our Authorised Version. It will be commended to us as such by the accurate copies of that which was originally penned by the Scripture writers whilst inspired and impelled by the Holy Spirit, so that the believer who does not read Greek or Hebrew can have absolute confidence that he is reading God’s Word as though he were actually reading the original. We have still the inspired Scriptures, and we have them in English. There is little doubt that this view is far closer to that which has been found among the people of God down through the centuries than the one now generally accepted by modern evangelicals and detractors of our Authorised Bible. At the same time it must be acknowledged that this historical testimony is insufficient authority on its own for the views we hold. Given the views of Owen and Turretin, with regard to the authenticity of the apographs or copies, and to inspiration, both men would certainly have rejected those modern translations espoused by many today who like to claim these men as their own. We dispute the view that translation undertaken by those qualified by the Holy Spirit to do such work must of necessity diminish, still less destroy, the perfection and infallibility inherent in inspired Scripture, or that inspiration disappears in copies and translations. How can the Bible be any the less the Word of God for being translated? This seems rather to reflect the superstitious stance of Muslims towards the Arabic Koran!
A translation is either the inspired Word of God in the same sense as the originals or it is not the Word of God at all and we ought all to set about learning Hebrew and Greek immediately so that we may have access to it and from thence food for our souls! This is our point of difference with Francis Turretin. In effect, he leaves access to the authentic Scriptures open only to those with a knowledge of the original languages and those without such knowledge dependent on the interpretations of a scholarly caste. To support his point, Turretin appears to make a distinction between the doctrine contained in Scripture and the words used. If so, we must dissent most strongly. A similar distinction is made by those who today argue that inspiration lies in the ‘meaning’ rather than the letter. As we would expect, Turretin held no such view with respect to the text, rigidly maintaining what at times almost appears to be a ‘dictation’ view of verbal inspiration. Our answer to him is the same as to those today who hold a ‘dynamic’ rather than a verbal view of inspiration. Meaning and doctrine are completely dependent upon the form of words used for their accurate expression and we cannot lose one single word, nor even change one, without at the same time losing or changing the doctrine being expressed. There are syntactical changes that develop in language over time, word-order being one example. This occurs particularly in languages other than English, such as Greek, German, Russian, that generally show ‘case’ by inflection rather than word-order. Orthographical changes also take place, and indeed spellings often differ where the same language is spoken in different countries. English spelling began to acquire some uniformity from around the year 1476 when William Caxton set up his printing press in the precincts of Westminster Abbey in London and adopted the English of London and the South-East of England as standard. Such changes can be made to translations, including the Bible, without affecting the meaning in any way. As we have already indicated, such judicious changes have been made to our 1611 Bible. However, once we begin to move much further than that, a deliberate change in vocabulary or grammar will introduce a different meaning. A precise meaning can often hang on a small word such as a preposition or an article. It is therefore essential to us that not one jot nor tittle should fail. It is essential that a translation of God’s word reproduce not an equivalence, either ‘formal’ or ‘dynamic’, but an identity or agreement of language, the same words in another language. Indeed, the term ‘formal’ equivalence is recent and is probably not the best description of what is being sought in the translation of the Bible. It was coined to distinguish traditional translation methodology from modern ‘dynamic’ equivalence translations in which something completely new in its own right is developed from the text in the source language (see Dayspring 10, 42-45 for more on translation methodology). In the best translations, when reading Martin Luther’s Works in English for example, someone with a good knowledge of the original German will be able to ‘read’ the original German text from the English translation almost sentence by sentence. Even the structure of the English sentences will often owe something to the original German whilst still remaining good readable English. It is this type of translation we have in our Authorised Version.
The English of the Authorised Version is not Elizabethan English, in fact, no one ever spoke in that way.
We must insist that the doctrinal content and the form of words in which they come to us cannot be separated. The one as the other comes from God. Let me quote again the words of John Owen, speaking of corruption in the originals, and remember by this he means the apographs, or extant copies, he says,
Owen also makes a clear distinction between the nature of secular works and divine revelation. Mistakes are easy enough to rectify in the mathematical writings of such as Euclid, but we are in a different world when speaking of divine revelation, he continues,
Owen’s Scriptures were no work of man, the grammar, the vocabulary, everything is given of God and not open to correction. The Scriptures cannot be corrected without the doctrine being affected. Where there is corruption of the text, where there are corrupt translations, Owen says, there will be corruption of doctrine because both doctrine and writing are equally given of God.
Language is the vehicle for the thoughts of God,
created and given of God and so perfectly suitable for this very purpose. Without
a completely reliable Bible we can have no completely reliable knowledge of God
nor of salvation in His Son.
2 ON THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY The difficulty with many of the arguments brought by those seeking sincerely and honestly to defend the integrity of God’s Word is that little or no account is taken of the fact that the discussion is taking place between two irreconcilable parties, each of which has its own belief system and mutually exclusive methodologies. Each side looks upon the beliefs of the other side with unbelief and scepticism. The believer regards the arguments of the unbeliever against Scripture as being falsehoods; the unbeliever regards the claims of believers as being contrary to proven fact. The Christian is seen by the rationalist as an ‘unbeliever’ to his rationalist faith; on the other side, the Christian regards the rationalist as an unbeliever to Bible truth. There are two different kinds of science and scholarship, even as there exist two different kinds of men, two different kingdoms. The difference is that as between darkness and light, falsehood and truth. Both systems claim the right to absolute rule, one legitimately the other illegitimately. The faith of the Christian believer rests in the one and only source of truth, God Himself, who has spoken to us by His Son.
To think the truth, we must think as God does. A verbal revelation of that truth is found today only in His written Word. If anyone maintains anything different to be the truth than that which has been revealed in God’s Word, he is lying. If anyone says about the Bible anything other than that which the Bible says of itself, then he sits in darkness. If we would argue according to the truth, we must accept what the Bible teaches, including what it says about itself. Scripture is not open to question. God alone is the arbiter of what is true and what is false. We can believe the truth or we can believe a lie. By contrast, the faith of the unbeliever is focussed upon himself. He denies that God’s knowledge of all things alone determines what is true or false. He imagines that the truth exists quite apart from God, and all that can be known is as accessible to him as it is to God. He can know as God does, even if admitting it may not be to the same degree, and he can do so without God. His independent opinion, he believes, is as valid as that of anyone else. After weighing the evidences, he will decide for himself what is right and wrong and with no reference to God’s Word. Men are, after all, ‘as gods’. In asking the unbeliever to examine the evidence for the Christian faith and to judge for himself, whether with respect to miracles, the resurrection, the text of the Scriptures, or whatever it is, we are pandering to his unbelief, to his rejection of God, and to his exaltation of himself. We make the pretended autonomy of his sinful mind the final authority in matters of truth. There is here an inherent contradiction in what we are asking. If he does weigh up the evidence using his unbelief as a measure, which he surely must do, then he is bound to reject the truth and choose the lie unless he first gives up his rebellion and submits to God’s truth. The sinner is not neutral and unbiased any more than is the believer. The sinner is biased in favour of falsehood, the believer in favour of the truth. What we ought to be asking him to do is to turn from his sin and to accept the truth, submitting to what God has given in Scripture. If what men believe about themselves were true, if it were possible for men to access the truth in independence of God, they would need no authoritative Scripture, except perhaps as an added source of information alongside what they can discover for themselves. We can only be sure of the truth by accepting unquestioningly what God has revealed in Scripture. This means above all that the unregenerate rationalist must accept that what the Bible says about himself is true, that he is a guilty sinner, lost and need of salvation, in need of cleansing in the precious blood of Christ. He must see that his godless thinking is fatally flawed and is complete foolishness.
Try telling your average university or college professor that! As a rebel and a sinner the man without Christ has a vested interest in denying all the Bible says about him. There is no way an unbeliever can accept the Word of God unreservedly without at the same time giving up his rebellion against God and this he will not do. Yet this is what he must do if he is to come to a knowledge of the truth. He must switch over to a completely new way of thinking, take God’s side, become a new man in Christ Jesus, then he will know the truth. One sure mark of regeneration is a love for the Word of God; one sure mark of being unregenerate is a hatred of it and a refusal to obey its teaching. Men do not see themselves as they truly are. It is sin that blinds the spiritual sight of men, not lack of evidence. It is sin that causes men to interpret everything they come upon with no consideration of what God Himself has said and revealed. It is sin that drives men to measure the truth about Scripture, its infallibility, its sufficiency, and its preservation by a standard other than by Scripture itself. The miracles, the prophecies, the teaching and doctrines of Scripture will all be misinterpreted until the sinner is brought to the point where he sees rejection of the Bible as God’s Word is itself sin. In his world the blind are not made to see, the deaf to hear, nor the lame to leap for joy - in ours they are and do. We stand as those born of the Spirit of God on the clear statements of the Word of God. Men will accept or reject them. We believe,
The Scriptures cannot be shown to be true or false by looking at ‘evidences’. The truth cannot be tested in unbelief by those predisposed to reject it. To demand proof is to be already in doubt or denial. Yet we must never suppose that faith is belief without evidence, it is rather to look at the evidence whilst believing the interpretation put on it by Scripture. The only other way that the evidence can be viewed is from a standpoint other than Scripture, which then must be a lie. No evidence speaks for itself, it is all subject to the interpretation we impose upon it. The alternative to faith is not reason, but unbelief! The unbeliever will interpret any evidence we put before him in a way that will strengthen not weaken his position. Everything depends upon which of the two systems of belief I use to examine the evidence, the true or the false, God’s Word or a mind adrift from God. Having already rejected every possibility of the Scriptures being the authoritative Word of God, standing outside the truth, it is not possible for an unbeliever whilst still holding on to the lie to accept the truth without first changing sides. Men are not called upon to examine the evidence, nowhere in Scripture do we find such an invitation. Men are called upon to repent, to turn from their rebellion and believe the Gospel or perish. It is not the task of God’s servants to discuss the truth with sinners, but to proclaim it. Before the Word of God there is nothing to be decided. Where it speaks, it speaks with absolute authority. The Bible calls upon men to forsake their sinful ways and their evil thoughts and to believe!
Move across! Leave the devil’s camp, come over to the side of Christ, believe His Word! Replace pride with pardon, exchange mutiny for mercy. This, this is the call we must sound! The Scriptures challenge the life and thought of the unbeliever at every point and they will brook no compromise. The Bible does not discuss the possibility that God may exist and may have created the universe, it does not give us a list of ‘proofs and evidences’, but it states categorically that it was so. The Bible opens with a most profound statement of fact.
Furthermore, God having created it, the whole universe shows forth His glory. This fills the believer with thankfulness and praise. This evidence of His creative handiwork is not there to convince the unbeliever of God’s existence and should not be used to this end. The unbeliever has an unthankful heart and is willingly blind to the true significance and meaning of all he encounters around him. His refusal of God as Creator is deliberate, as is his rejection of the flood - and all because he knows he must answer to God and that judgement awaits, the Bible says so:
God made the world, God keeps the world, God preserves the world now for judgement along with all ungodly men. The sinner is already convinced in the depths of his heart that God is there, no one fights a non-existent enemy. The intense irritation of conscience he does all he can to eradicate. All creation condemns men’s unbelief and leaves them each and everyone without excuse.
Everything he looks at shouts at him: “God made me!” As the old saying goes, there are none so deaf as those who will not hear. Proofs against evolution are worse than useless in seeking to persuade men because they bypass the real problem: the problem of guilt, of sin and of deliberate blindness. There is no lack of evidence, it is all around us; there is just lack of sight. Men are willingly deaf, willingly blind. Do not waste your breath arguing with the spiritually deaf and blind about what they will not see, take up the Scriptures and ask them about their relationship to God, ask them about that which really gnaws at their conscience, point to the Lord Jesus as the only Saviour of men. The sinner does not mind arguing with us over things such as creation and the flood because we are moving in his territory of unbelief and he knows the ground well, he has his reasons all lined up in readiness, here he is king and has the upper-hand. His misinterpretation of creation and of everything else is due to his rejection of God and this can be corrected only by repentance, faith, and an unequivocal acceptance of the absolute authority of God’s Word. We ought to keep to our own territory, that of faith. Let us stick by what Scripture says. We begin with Scripture, we continue with Scripture, we end with Scripture. All too often we talk to each other as though we were all unbelievers. We speak as though we have to demonstrate even to each other that the Scriptures are true using ‘evidences’ drawn from outside Scripture, from archaeology, from history, from textual studies, when all the time the highest authority we can have is Scripture itself. Since we now have the Code of Hammurabi, king of Babylon at around the time of Abraham, we are told that as a result we know now that Moses was able to write after all, he could therefore be the author of the Pentateuch. This is something once thought to have been very unlikely, if not impossible. No, we have a higher authority than that of archaeology, the Word of God. These things, we say, show us that the Bible is true. They do not, on the contrary, we need the Bible to show us the meaning of all these matters external to Scripture. Nothing comes to us as a neutral, un- interpreted ‘fact’. We either see everything as a chaotic meaningless jumble of unrelated facts requiring the mind of man to bring to them some kind of order, to describe them in terms of self-sustaining ‘natural law’, or we shall see in creation a coherent unity with everything in it already possessing a meaning and purpose allotted to it by God, all being faithfully sustained and kept by His power until He shall fold them up as a vesture and they shall be changed. This we know from Scripture. The problem for most of us is that throughout the whole of our pre-conversion lives we have been conditioned by ungodly patterns of thinking so that after our conversion they can be difficult to shake off. Indeed, we may not even recognise them as such. Many of these ways we will have acquired through contact with the world, its media, our schooling, and so on. The Bible tells us it is possible to train up children in the ways of the Scriptures and godly thought, even before they make a profession of faith. This is the reason behind a Christian education and upbringing.
Children are to be trained in godly paths, including the way they think, so that even in an unconverted state such habits will dominate their lives and be conducive to repentance and faith in Christ. It is sometimes objected that children are not converted through training but just ‘christianised’, but are we then to tell our children lies, train them in ungodliness? Let us remember the words of the Lord Jesus to those who would obstruct the simple faith of children who would trust Him.
We must now, as believers, continually check out the way we think against what we read in Scripture. We need to take to heart the words of the apostle Paul.
We are often told we ought to persuade our unbelieving opponent of the truth by first putting ourselves in his position. We are supposed to see things from the unbeliever’s point of view - but what we have then forgotten is that the unbeliever’s point of view is one of unbelief, denial, and rebellion against God. We can look for common ground, but we will never find it in the unbelieving, rebellious mind of unregenerate men. The mind of unbelievers is given over to fleeing the truth, to excusing themselves and accusing others. It started in Eden. Who did Adam blame? He blamed his wife. Who did Eve blame? She blamed the serpent. But who did Adam really blame? He blamed God! He despised the goodness of God.
The book of Genesis is full of firsts, and this is the father of all lame excuses - and men, we have all done it. Ladies, who do you blame, the children perhaps? And the children? Ask any group of children, “Who kicked the ball through my window?” They all point to each other, or blame someone who lives in the next street. We all start this game early and no one needs to teach us how to do it. The natural, sinful mind is out to place blame for the responsibility of sin in some other place than where it truly belongs.
Do you want an explanation for evolution, for science, and for virtually all human wisdom and understanding? Evolution must be one of the biggest confidence tricks ever pulled in the history of the human race. Wrapping it up in the respectability of science changes nothing. Here is the real motive! The mind alienated from God is all geared up to escaping all personal responsibility for sin. Godless human understanding has nothing to do with knowledge and the mind, but everything to do with sin and guilt. All men want to do is let themselves off the hook and explain everything in some other way than according to the truth. Deny that God made you and you have no one to answer to for your sin. Wrap it up in brown paper of primitive media presentations or the gold foil of the obscure convolutions of academia, it all amounts to the same thing. A mind pre-set to excusing itself for sin will not listen to godly reason. Today you can believe in flying saucers and little green men on Mars, but not in a God who calls sinners to account. How then can we reach men with the truth? The Bible tells us. The Word of God must be applied to the con-science. Here God has an ally within every man with which His Spirit can work. If men are to be convinced, they must first be convicted. Of the Gentiles, who had not been exposed to the Old Testament Scriptures, the apostle Paul writes:
Their conscience accuses them, their mind and their thoughts accuse others. They know right and wrong, this is why they spend their life on the run from their conscience. This is what the working of the human mind is all about. All men know themselves to be guilty before God and to be facing His wrath and indignation! How do they know?
How then did they get themselves into all this mess? How come they invent all this nonsense? The Bible tells us.
This is why we do not get involved in discussing the foolishness that the natural godless man counts as wisdom. Men know who God is. Don’t give me all that nonsense about atheists! Remember, it is all a gigantic cover-up operation. Everyone is on the run. Men need to be brought up short, stopped in their tracks, confronted with the truth as it is in Christ Jesus and not confirmed in their unbelief. Sinful men search for God with the same intensity as a thief looking for a policeman! Why then do we spend our time trying to persuade men from a position of unbelief, from within their own foolishness? In arguing from the unbeliever’s viewpoint we become, as it were, unbelievers arguing for the truth! In seeking this kind of common ground we end up forsaking a position of faith for the camp of our opponents. We delude ourselves, if we think that by deciphering the dinosaur, demystifying the deluge, we can convince the ungodly of the truth. If we are ourselves standing where those who reject the truth stand, then we should not be surprised when we make such little progress. We are going down a road that has led men to reject the truth in order to persuade them to accept it. This cannot work. In a world of blind men it makes no sense at all to poke out our own eyes as well, thinking that as a result we shall all be able to see! We cannot take the side of the enemy in order to persuade him of the truth!
Walk with the ungodly, stand with sinners, sit with the scornful, and we shall come to the same conclusions as they do and end up rejecting the Word of God. Why is it that so many who once walked with us, now speak against us? Is this not the reason why many who once proclaimed the word of truth, now preach the word of doubt? Make common cause with unbelievers, even thinking to defend the truth, seek common ground to win over the sceptics, and you will end up denying the truth, because in sharing the unequal yoke you will already have left the truth! Those who have no Word of God have nothing, they cannot even read the evidence aright and especially not with respect to God’s Word. Instead of siding with the enemy by looking for extra-biblical evidence to show whether what we read in Scripture is or is not true, we ought to dismiss out of hand right from the outset any suggestion that Scripture could be wrong in anything it says. How often even writers seeking to support Scripture come with some new ‘discovery’ and tell us that the Bible is true after all! Well, big deal, we knew this all the time so they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort! If we must look at historical evidence, and who is to deny this is often very interesting, then what we can do is look at it, explain and correct it, using the Bible account as a guide. We cannot use historical evidence to in some way ‘prove’ to godless minds that the Bible is true. We interpret history from the Bible and not the other way round. Prove and explain history from the Bible, that makes far more sense. Those scholars who tell us the evidence for this or that does not exist are not interested in proving the Bible right, but wrong. We shall not give way an inch, not let them think for a minute they can deny God’s own Word and still be right. We do not show the Bible to be true by answering their critical questions, but by exposing them as being motivated by unbelief and rebellion. Everything in Scripture is the truth and according to the truth, whether it is history, science, or whatever else. When the Bible tells us in the book of Daniel that there was a king whose name was Darius, then it was so. Whatever the opinions and views of critics and commentators, they change nothing. What is true remains true, whether they see it or not. Even although they substitute their own alternative explanation, this changes nothing, the truth remains and their inventions are just that. We do not ‘prove’ the truth or make it the truth by exposing the liar, useful though it may be at times. Archaeologists may protest they have no certain evidence that there was ever such a king as David. They may have none, but we most certainly do. There is no need for us to search for evidence and write learned tomes to prove the Bible right as many commentators have done, even ‘conservative’ and ‘fundamentalist’ writers. We need no other ‘proof’ than that the God who speaks only truth has given us His Word of truth in Scripture. To question Scripture in any way is to act according to the lie, it is ultimately to call God a liar and attempt to make ourselves the judge of all truth in God’s place. It is to determine what can and cannot be true ourselves, when what we should be doing is seeking to know the truth from the One who alone is in a position to know and reveal it. We have nothing less than God’s own Word that Darius and David lived, and so it cannot be other than fact, that is sufficient. So when any smart aleck arrives on the scene to tell us Darius or David may not have been real persons, we know with complete certainty that they are spinning us a yarn and we do not need to give any further attention to their rubbish talk. Many conservative scholars who have set out to test the poison have ended up as victims of it themselves! What is true of history is equally true of science. When the Bible tells us
We know that anyone then telling us all our ancestors were apes is in the business of storytelling. They should leave such nonsense to Aesop and the brothers Grimm, or they should turn to entertaining their friends by writing science fiction, for many of them are already producing it by the ream. This is not being obscurantist, it is getting at the truth, learning our science from the One who created science. There was no big bang and no primeval slime. Evolution is a fabrication of fevered sinful minds seeking a non-existent escape route from God. There can be no higher authority, no more accurate account of what happened at the beginning than from the One who was at least there! God’s Word is sufficient to be taken on its own as an historical record of how the universe came into being. As with history, we interpret what we find around us in the light of that account. Many think to move to some mythical ‘neutral’ ground in trying to convince others, stand together with unbelievers to look at the matter objectively. The last thing that sinners are, is neutral and objective, they are totally biased and with very good reason. They will only accept as truth what they say is truth even when something other than their ‘truth’ is staring them in the face. To move to an imagined ‘neutrality’ from a position of acceptance of the truth is to have already left the truth behind in order to get into bed with the enemy. To agree even a common starting point with our enemy is to confirm his unbelief. Godless men have a vested interest in denying the Genesis account, they have an interest in suppressing and twisting evidence of God not uncover-ing it, and so we cannot trust what they say. Men as sinners are unwilling to acknowledge God as their Creator and God to whom they must give account. They will not acknowledge His intimate involvement with every detail of their lives. No one can declare his independence from God and take an objective look at things, even in part, and expect at the same time to arrive at the truth. This position presumes bias. To separate from God is to separate from the truth. There can be no mixture. The teaching of the Bible cannot simply be tacked on to that which man can discover all on his own. Even apart from sin we are finite and do not possess the exhaustive know-ledge that God does; something man in his pride is reluctant to admit even to himself, he imagines he has the right to know everything, and given time he almost thinks it possible. By even acknowledging that unbelievers are able to make judgements about the Word of God, we are subjecting God Himself to the judgement of sinners. By asking them to judge the evidence for themselves, we have already given ground to them. We are agreeing with their own false views about themselves and about God. We are saying, they can judge even as God can judge and can quite apart from Him arrive at valid judgements about His Word. Conclusions they draw about the Bible must then be as valid as statements the Bible makes about itself. We are acknowledging their falsehoods as a valid point of view when we should instead be exposing them from Scripture as the lies of the enemy of souls. We ought to be calling for an about-turn, sounding a clarion call for an end to rebellion and for surrender to God through His Son, and calling upon God’s enemies to accept the authority of His infallible Word. What we do instead is to wimpishly allow unbelievers and all those who cast doubt on God’s Word to ‘call the shots’ and to dictate the terms of the debate. For them, what cannot be measured with their own yardstick does not exist. Yet, they are allowed to determine on what grounds they will or will not accept the Scriptures. On this basis we sit down to parley with the enemy, but in truth we are agreeing terms of surrender. We cannot defend the Scriptures by denying them. We cannot set to one side what the Scriptures say about themselves and begin scraping around elsewhere for reasons to believe them, because what the Scriptures say about themselves is the truth, and if we forsake the Scriptures we forsake the truth. If its own statements about itself are not true, then there is little point in trying to demonstrate by other means that the Bible is the Word of God. To look for other arguments is to look in vain. We are looking for gold amongst the garbage, treasure amongst the trash. To set the Bible on one side when speaking with un-believers, is to set aside the one reliable source of truth we have in this world. We can only defend Scripture on the basis of Scripture. Any reasonable person when confronted with the evidence will, we say, concede that our arguments are valid. Any reasonable person will not see any such thing as long as their reasoning is grounded anywhere else but in the truth of Scripture. This is true when speaking of God’s existence, creation, prophecy, the resurrection, the inspiration of Scripture. Even were it possible for us to demonstrate to the satisfaction of unbelievers that Christ rose physically from the dead - and how many books are there in Christian bookstores attempting to do just that - we would still only have confirmed them in their unbelief, for their acceptance would be on the basis of their own godless reason, they would see that it is a ‘reasonable’ thing to believe, it has some rational explanation, it measures up to their humanistic yardstick! I can tell you something, this would not be the resurrection of the Lord Jesus they were talking about. Taking this route their faith would remain in themselves and still not be resting in the written Word of God. They would still not be submitted to God. By their own decision to accept they remain the ultimate authority of what can be known. The Word of God demands our submission to its truth, not our validation of it. Says the apostle Paul,
What we have being saying thus far is also true when speaking in defence of the Authorised Version. This is some-thing that may never have even crossed our minds. We line up our charts, we count up our verses, we list our manuscripts - and do not mis-understand me here, all these things are very helpful at times in the right place - but then we go on to say, look at the evidence, you must now believe that the Authorised Version is God’s Word to us in the English language. No my friends, we cannot work in this way. Even if we are persuaded by arguments from the manuscripts and the like, this leaves our faith in God’s Word still resting in the human arguments of external evidence. If we are to have an unshakeable confidence in the Authorised Version as the pure Word of God in the English language, that confidence must itself be rooted in Scripture. The question is not whether the manuscript evidence, the textual evidence, and the historical evidence, all demand we accept the Authorised Version of the Bible as the perfect Word of God and therefore we must reject the modern perversions. The question is whether the Word of God itself leads us to expect this one authoritative Word in a language we understand. If we affirm this, we must be able to show it from Scripture for otherwise we have no case! We can defend nothing that is not rooted in Scripture, however convincing our external arguments from history or from the texts and manuscripts may appear to us to be. We dare not rest our
faith in God’s Word on any ‘neutral’, quasi-objective consideration of external
facts, rather the opposite, what we have read in the Scriptures themselves must
determine how to deal with matters such as manuscripts, translation, and every-thing
else. An understanding of those things external to the Scriptures must line up
with what the Scriptures themselves teach.
3 NO MATTER OF CHOICE There are those who would have us believe that this whole question as to which translation of the Word of God we use is nothing more than a matter of preference and choice. Whatever choice we make, that will be the correct Bible for us. This can never be so. Those who rather patronisingly imply the preference for the King James Bible is merely one of habit and upbringing or even uninformed prejudice, are all too often guilty of trivialising, belittling, and mis-representing deeply held convictions. Their remarks sometimes smack more of impudence than good manners. By stigmatising rigorous critical appraisal of their stance as abuse or divisive, it is thought opponents will be cowed into silence, leaving them a clear road to continue to propagate what would otherwise come under close scrutiny and censure. A recent book of this ilk is The Word of Truth by Robert J. Sheehan, published here in the UK by the Evangelical Press. The author has the gall to infer that the choice of translation is guided purely by tradition. He then goes on to suggest that such people deny to others the freedom to make choices and to find a favourite version. He further hopes that each person will be allowed to make his or her choice without being subjected to abuse from those who differ. This book is typical of many today that have the overall effect of undermining confidence in the integrity of the text of Scripture and sow seeds of doubt in the minds of God’s children concerning the Word of God. It is part of a steady drift from the “faith once delivered” on the part of evangelicals and many in the ‘reformed’ tradition, accompanied by changes in the way the Gospel is preached and presented. It is the pathway to apostasy. What version of the Bible we use is not a matter of choice but of obedience. Preference does not even enter into the equation. Were this a question of a different understanding of the teaching of Scripture, we would have some basis for discussion, but because the issue is to be decided outside the Scriptures where the pretended auto-nomy of human reason reigns and ‘choice’ is king, we have no common ground. You make up your mind, I make up mine, both views are equally valid. This is not the approach of biblical faith but of unbridled rational-ism. It simply will not do to run away and hide behind such platitudinous remarks as: ‘I have my own views on these things’. They are always a ‘cop-out’. The expression ‘making choices’ is an unfortunate one, depending on your point of view, ofcourse! On the other hand, it does rather give the game away. It is an expression heard constantly these days among those influenced by existentialism and contemporary psychotherapy and it comes as a surprise to find it in the writings of anyone professing anything remotely akin to a biblical Gospel. It is virtually impossible to use these expressions without at the same time dragging with them all the connotative baggage modern readers will inevitably attribute to them. The pivotal point in this godless way of thinking is an exercise of the will, take the leap, the choice is yours to make. Throw off that which predetermines, all that which fetters freedom of choice! Choice alone will not lead to the truth. One choice is not as valid as the next, one will be a right choice, another a wrong one. My choice is no criterion of truth and most certainly not of what is and what is not the Word of God.
None of us possesses this ‘freedom to make choices’, not if we would know what is the truth. If there is to be any freedom, it must be the freedom to submit to what the Bible teaches about itself and not to be bound any longer by sin to reject its truth. Those who make the translation of Scripture a matter of personal choice can never ever say that any book they hold in their hands is word-for-word the inspired Word of God. For them the verbally inspired Scripture no longer exists anyway. It disappeared many years ago when the actual writings of the prophets and apostles fell apart. Where we have a dozen Bibles each saying different things, which then is telling us the truth and which is lying? They cannot all be true renderings of God’s infallible Word surely? They often contradict each other. Shall we toss a coin, perhaps? Shall we pick out the rendering that best suits our own foibles. You pays your money and takes yer choice! Let preference and choice decide the truth! Such thinking as this has moulded the world in which we live, ‘do your own thing’ has dominated both private and public ‘values’ and its devastating results are clear for us all to see in the moral morass all around us.
The truth, the good, the gap left by God, is filled by human choice, by an exercise of the will. Those using the Authorised Version are more often than not deprived of any ‘choice’ anyway, by being handed a modern version at the door of the Church, or by being made to feel fuddy-duddy and outmoded in front of others! How many times has a modern version been foisted upon a Church without any prior consultation? In the end it all comes down to a matter of personal choice! Hurrah, it is make-up-your-own-mind time, too bad you are stuck in the past! On this basis, freedom to choose, conscience, all have a higher authority than the Word of God itself. Not true! Will, con-science, reason, are all bound by Scripture, and are all to be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. What matters is not my opinion or choice, but the truth - and this we find in Scripture! This is an approach we find increasingly among those clamouring for new and ‘modern’ versions of Scripture, even the thought that we should need an up-dated Bible betrays this tendency. These people have surely not bought ‘the lie’? Closer examination shows the use of modern versions to be a collateral to a new ‘gospel’ being preached by many of these compulsive ‘modernisers’, it is a gospel showing less and less resemblance to the pure Gospel of Christ. They are obsessed with being modern. They accuse us of being obsessed with the past. ‘The past is gone,’ they cry, ‘we are in-tune with today.’ Underlying this very seductive approach is the notion that if only the Gospel of Christ can be shown to unbelievers as being ‘relevant’, dressed up in easy-to-read modern language - please do not let me have to use my mind - swathed in an accompanying raucous dissonance of modern music, or a join-the-golf-club mentality if you are a little older, show that you are a ‘normal’ person, identify with the world around you, then any reasonable person will be forced to admit there must be some truth in this Gospel after all! This gospel is ‘modern’, ‘relevant’! Whilst lip service is paid to a work of the Spirit of God, at the same time the underlying premise is and remains humanist and rationalist and constitutes a move further and further away from a biblical view of the darkened human heart. The sinner does not, and indeed cannot and will not see the Gospel as being anything related to his own need. Whatever impressions we may receive at times to the contrary, we must begin not with our impressions, but with the plain words of Scripture:
Our argument is not that man cannot reason, but that his ability to reason since the fall is seriously biased and flawed, and will inevitably err. Our reason, as every other faculty, must be used in submission to the Word of God and can never be used as a judge of it. Only a believer will want to think as God does and so will turn to the Scriptures. The natural man cannot be relied upon all on his own to make reliable judgements, or ‘choices’, about the things he observes in the world around him and certainly not about the one place where he will read of his own sin and miserable condition, the Bible. Clearly, many of the ‘modernising tendency’ go part of the way down the road of a Roman Catholic view of the nature of human reason, preserving intact from the effects of the fall, or so they think, at least some of the powers of human reasoning. Discuss-ing this issue John Wesley says,
If godless men do draw right conclusions, it will only be by the grace of God and not because of anything necessary or inherent in the human mind. That those outside Christ are able to get their maths right, indeed that maths function at all, is only due to the faithfulness of God. What men call natural law is an observation of the way God works in His world. It still does not work without Him. That He continually works in the same way provides a basis on which science can operate. Godless science denies the very power of God that enables it to function. The explanation for any phenomenon will not be found within itself, neither is it to be found within man himself, but with God whose work it is. The Bible tells us this.
God intervenes directly in preserving life on earth, every detail of human life is enclosed in the providence of God. Contrary to the faith of the rationalist, nothing functions without Him. The apparent vagaries of the weather are neither by chance nor fixed laws, but are the works of God.
Everything man discovers has been put there by God for man to find and use, whether this be iron ore, electricity, radio waves, whatever it is.
Godless men discover the truth only in contradiction to their own belief system and even then what they do and say, if it is the truth, will be fully in accord with the teaching of Scripture. God often preserves men from the results of their folly to the end that they should repent and believe the Gospel, but men despise His goodness by using it in their rebellion against Him. Before the fall, after the fall, we need the wisdom of God. We cannot operate outside it.
There is more than a suggestion in Sheehan’s book that the infallibility of Scripture is at least in part due to the reliability of innate human reason. Why do people write such stuff and nonsense? He maintains that the ability to get things right is part of our humanity as the powers of reason with which we were created have not been totally removed. He continues to say that if we add to the human ability to sometimes get things right the power of God to sustain a person in making correct statements, then the possibility of an infallible Scripture is present. He states that there is a hidden atheism in the suggestion that God could not enable men to record his Word without error. Such sentiments suggest that part of the Bible is of divine origin and part of human origin. Surely, this cannot be what the author must mean? This more modern view contrasts starkly with that of our forefathers. Were they less enlightened than we? Far from it! John Owen once more,
Let us further grant to the author of The Word of Truth, the atheism to which he refers is not that defined by Feuerbach as being a denial of the attributes of divinity to man. Despite this, in attributing to man the kind of reason he does, the author is in effect doing just that, attributing to man what is true only of God. Our reason has not been removed, but most certainly it has been downgraded and perverted by the fall and made unreliable. This demonstrates even further the need for the Scriptures, enlightened to our hearts and minds by the Holy Spirit. Man’s reason, even before the fall, was always and always will be derivative and not determinative. It does not float free in some kind of nebulous neutrality. Man’s reasoning must reflect the reasoning of God in all things, if it is to be true. Is there then a remnant within us unaffected by sin? It is not true that every rationalist is an atheist, anymore than that every atheist is a rationalist. It is alarming to find such blatant rationalism alive and kicking in evangelical circles. One is a rationalist who gives a place to reason, to any degree, that is not warranted by Scripture; who gives to it a sphere where it can operate outside and beyond the reach of Scripture. Some of the most dangerous forms of rationalism are those where faith and reason are mixed; where faith is delegated to one sphere but excluded from those where reason rules; or where faith may be added to reason and what man can work out for himself. The father of English empiricism, Francis Bacon, along with other scientists of his day, believed in a God of reason who had created a reasonable universe. It was open therefore to man, by use of his own reason to discover the form of the universe. His book Nova Atlantis was one of the great utopias of the era and describes a world fully regulated by reason. Even so, as yet neither man nor God had themselves become caught up in the machinery so as to become part of it, this was to follow with other philosophers. In Bacon’s thinking both God and man were still able to influence the working of the universe from outside. We cannot approach any question relating to the Bible, its texts, its preservation, its translation, or any other aspect, using human reason that is not itself submitted to plain statements of the Word of God. It cannot be that some questions are to be decided by unbridled human reason and others by faith. It is not that we do not use the mind God has given us, but that this mind, as all other faculties, is not free to roam where it will, but is to be subject to the Scriptures; if that is, we would know the truth about anything. What then is the Word of God? Is it in the end, what I decide it is? - and don’t you sit in judgement on me for that, we are told! I shall take the Bible version I want to, and do not give me abuse by saying it is not the Word of God! It is only your opinion anyway! To think that all this parades as biblical Christianity is too scandalous for words. What is being preached by these men is a deadly mixture and contrary to the Gospel. We accept the teaching of Scripture or we reject it and accept the pre-suppositions of the kingdom of darkness. There can be no borrowing from the arguments of the other side to prove our own points. There is no such thing as ‘mix and match’. As believers we cannot departmentalise everything into science, history, textual or translation science, and then interpret each without reference to the Bible. This is what the unbeliever expects the Christian to do and many fall for it. The believer is then expected to line up what he reads in the Bible with the findings of these autonomous areas of scholarly enquiry. It cannot be done. An assumed autonomy to think
and make judgements of any kind about the Scriptures without reference to the
Scriptures themselves can only lead to a denial of the truth. It is this professed
ability to discover the truth with unaided natural reason that unbelievers and
those who are infected with rationalist thinking will not allow to be challenged,
and it is precisely this that must be challenged and shown to be self-deception.
4 THE WORD OF GOD IN ENGLISH IS STILL THE WORD OF GOD As believers we must argue from the position of the truth, that of the Bible being the unadulterated and pure Word of God, perfectly preserved, and in our hands today as it came from God to those who wrote it but in a language we can understand. Without this we have no authoritative Word - on anything! We believe this, and base all our presuppositions concerning every aspect of created reality, and our knowledge of salvation, on this Word, including what it says concerning itself. We rely on its truth. There is no neutral point from which saint and sinner may both stand back and view matters from a common perspective, both have divergent starting points and beliefs. Our interpretation will proceed from God and His revealed Word of truth or it will not and will be false. The believer accepts without question the absolute authority and sufficiency of Scripture. We need none, nor do we possess any other such revelation. If our English Authorised Version upon which we have relied is a book of errors, however few, however insignificant, then we have built on sand. But is this simply a question of scholarship, are there not other factors at work here? When scholars cast doubt upon the reliability of the divine texts, it is not because they want to show the Bible to be God’s Word, but because they would drag it down to the level of a human, if somewhat unusual book, and therefore open to all the critical techniques employed in establishing the original texts of secular literature. Equally, we have no hesitation in questioning the motives of those so very eager to dispose of those translations that have stood the test of time for accuracy and reliability and upon which God has set His own seal of approval. Why change something that cannot be bettered? Can it be that what they read there does not suit the modified Gospel they now preach? Apostates need an apostate bible from which to preach! We have it on the highest possible authority that the Authorised Version of the Bible is the Word of God in the English language. Indeed without such authority we ought to make no such stand. Let others claim the authority of theological tradition, of Warfield or A. A. Hodge, for us this is insufficient. The Scriptures themselves teach us that we are to expect God to give us His Word in a language we can understand - and there can be no higher authority than that. Just as the botanist learns about the nature of the plant he is studying by examining it, so we learn about the Scriptures by looking into them. If we would show that our Authorised Version is and remains the authentic Word of God, we must do so on the basis of what it teaches about itself. Whether it is God’s Word or not will be not decided by our ability to confound the critics and harass the historians. The Bible is God’s Word because God gave it and so it is authoritative in what it says about itself. If the Bible were not already God’s Word, there would be no point in trying to show that it is. Our faith in the plain statements of the Bible with respect to itself is not a blind faith. True faith rests on testimony and evidence, but the question is whose testimony, whose evidence? The evidence that God has provided, and there can be no higher authority, is in His written Word. Indeed, if the Bible itself does not bear witness to its own divine origin and infallibility, then we are not bound to believe it, rather it would be foolish to do so. If the testimony of Scripture
to itself cannot be appealed to, then neither can we rely upon it for teaching
on any other truths - wrong as to itself, wrong about everything else. How can
we be persuaded that the Bible we have came from God? What we believe about the
Bible must be taken from the Bible itself. If we believe the King James Authorised
Version of the Bible to be the Word of God to us in our own language, we must
first be able to show that this is what the teaching of Scripture itself demands
or we must desist. If this is what the Scripture says, we must then face whatever
difficulties we may subsequently encounter concerning texts or with history in
the light of the reality that this translation is already the Word of God. We
believe that God intends that we should have access to His Word, perfect and intact,
and in our own language, without fault as He has given it. There are many reasons
for saying this all of which can be drawn from the teaching of Scripture.
4.1 THE NATURE OF GOSPEL PREACHING IN THE PRESENT DISPENSATION 4.1.1 All men need to hear the perfect Word of God in a language they can understand, if they are to be saved. Are you saved, dear friend? Then it can only be because at some time or other you have been exposed to God’s Word.
Where have we come into contact with this Word of God that is both perfect and converts the soul? Was it the Greek we read, or perhaps the Hebrew? It can only have been in a language we understand, and this presumes for most reading these words, that the perfect Word of God was available to us in the English language for us to have come to faith.
Certain things we are aware of already by virtue of being made in the image of God, although we still need the Scriptures to interpret to us their meaning. We all know that God exists, although by nature we suppress this knowledge, some with more success than others. Even although we may never have opened a Bible, we know the difference between right and wrong for the law is written in our hearts, although this too is warped by a sinful and unreliable conscience in need of the correction of Scripture. We all know that we must account for ourselves before God, we know we shall be found wanting and as a result face the wrath of God. The Bible tells us that all this all men know, albeit imperfectly. What all men do not know is how their guilt can be dealt with, how they can find peace with God, how they can pass from death to life. What the sinner does not know apart from Scripture is how the Lord Jesus, God’s Son, in infinite love, came to shed his blood for sinful men. To know this, we need the Word of God and this Word must therefore come to us in the certainty of being without the slightest error, for how else can we have confidence that anything we are reading is actually the truth? Clearly, it must come in a language we can understand. The Gospel command to believe goes out to all men everywhere without exception to call upon the name of the Lord Jesus. The Gospel call is not restricted to a particular kind of individual. Some say only the elect are invited, or only those under deep conviction of sin, some lay down other conditions. This is despite the fact that the goodness and longsuffering of God towards all men, sustaining them day by day, keeping them alive, is a sure indication that He does not seek the death of any sinner, but that He extends the opportunity for all to repent. The answer to ‘easy-believism’ is not ‘hard-believism’. There can be no other reason that God should sustain sinful men who continually refuse Him and that He should not send them all to hell immediately they draw their first breath, unless it is that they should hear the Gospel, believe, call upon Him, and be saved.
The only qualification we need to call upon the name of the Lord in faith is to be a helpless sinner in need of salvation. The Bible says that all may come, no one is forbidden, all those who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. The Bible says so.
We say again, does anyone want to be saved from sin, then call upon the Lord in faith, knowing you will be received. The Gospel call is not restricted to any particular race, to Jewish people, to English people, or any other, it goes out to those of all nations. If we are to call upon the name of the Lord, we must first believe. There is no point in calling upon Someone in whom we have no confidence that he is able or willing to save us.
In order to believe we need to hear, and how shall we hear without a preacher preaching in a language we understand, bringing the Word of God in a language we understand. Men are lost either because they never hear the Gospel, if they do not hear they cannot believe; or they are lost because, having heard, they do not obey the Gospel. This was true in Israel.
From where does the faith needed come to call upon the name of the Lord? It comes through hearing the Word of God. Without the Word of God we will not come to salvation.
In other words, without the Word of God no one is saved. The glory of God has been declared in His creation from the beginning, irrespective of place or language. The Psalmist says,
The apostle Paul takes this passage to introduce a new situation as far as the Gentiles are concerned. That which was the specific privilege of the Jew, ‘that unto them were committed the oracles of God’ (Romans 3:2) - the written Word of God - upon their refusal to receive the living Word (John 1:11), was extended to the Gentile nations to provoke Israel to jealousy.
Paul quotes Moses and Isaiah to this effect:
The preaching of the Word of God is in this present day and generation to every creature and to every nation, to the end that they should hear, obey the Gospel, and be saved. As God’s glory in what He has created speaks of his eternal power and Godhead, as this revelation in the natural world surpasses the limitations of language and leaves all without excuse, then equally, if this written Word by which comes saving faith is to go out through all the earth, if this Word is to reach to the end of the world, then there can be no speech, no language, where it is not heard. If men of all tongues and nations are to believe, they need the Word of God, this presumes it will come to them in a language they can understand for how else can they hear, how else will they be saved?
We know that God has promised to give us His Word and to preserve it. It follows
that for as long as the Gospel is to be preached so too will God make His pure
Word available to those with ears to hear His voice. Let us be clear about this
matter, our salvation depends upon whether we have access to the undefiled Word
of the living God in a language we can understand.
4.1.2 God who gave the nations their many languages does not confine His Word to just two of them. Evolutionary science dates the emergence of man at anything from between 250,000 and 500,000 B.C. and homo sapiens as being fully developed soon after 20,000 B.C. It will seek to explain the origin, growth and develop-ment of language in terms of human evolution. As Bible believers we reject this position totally as falsehood. If languages simply arose on their own in the random manner in which historical linguists suggest, then it is difficult to see how the Word of God given in one language can be transferred perfectly from one to another, the differences between each one would be too great. There could be no guarantee of any common linguistic structure that would make translation possible. As language is not the product of evolutionary chance, but of God’s guiding hand in creation and providence, so the situation is very different. It is interesting that scholars are generally agreed that the earliest extant documents go back no further than about the third millennium B.C. Give and take a few hundred years, this would date them approximately as being shortly after the flood. This makes good sense as everything prior to that time would almost certainly have perished in the waters of the flood. From a Bible standpoint, they would also have to be post-Babel. These earliest texts are in the Sumerian language, spoken in the region between the Persian Gulf and Babylon. They were written in cuneiform script which was formed by the impression of a stylus onto blocks of soft clay which were then sun-dried or baked until hard. Although break-able, because they were impervious to moisture when buried in the sand they were almost indestructible. The mark of the stylus looks like a hollow nail, or wedge, which gives the writing its name of ‘cuneiform’. Cuneiform script was syllabic, its characters represented the combined sounds of syllables, rather than the individual sounds represented by single letters of an alphabet. Who then are the Sumerians? According to the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, who excavated the area in the late 1920s, they are to be identified with the people who in Genesis 11:2 moved from the east to live in a plain in the land of Shinar, Babylon. What we are likely to be talking about are remnants of the Babylonian civilisation begun by Nimrod. Linguists since the early nineteenth century have attempted to put together a picture of the development of the world’s languages using this and later material. By comparing what they had to hand they have tried to penetrate backwards in time into the pre-document period of language. By comparing the earliest forms of a large number of languages, they have established relationships and similarities between languages which at first seem to be quite unrelated, but then by projecting these common elements backwards, they claim to have uncovered the basic features of the undocumented languages from which the extant languages are descended. Despite their best efforts, good scholars will admit that these reconstructions are at best only partial. Scholars are disappointed to find little light cast by their research on the origins of human speech, from which, at least according to their reckoning, we are separated by several hundred thousand years. The parent languages from which all others are said to be descended are: Semitic, Polynesian, African, and our own Indo-European. The groups of languages said to have descended from Indo-European are: Indian; Iranian; Armenian; Albanian; Baltic; Slavonic; Greek; Italic; Celtic; Germanic, which includes English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and the Scandinavian languages; and about half-a-dozen or so minor groups. It was even thought at one time that if the process of comparison and reconstruction were repeated a sufficient number of times, it would be possible to go right back to the original human language, or Ursprache. Scholars now think that such comparative philological methods are unlikely to lead us back to the origins of human language. What they seem to have disallowed is that the original language spoken in the Garden of Eden could well be one that is still with us! This process all started in the early days of the Indian Raj, when a British judge, Sir William Jones, discovered during his legal researches into ancient classical Sanskrit that it possessed some striking likenesses to Latin and Greek. The Sanskrit word for father he found was pitar, very similar to pater. The Latin word for mother is mater, the Sanskrit was matar. He found more such similarities. As a result of his findings, speaking to the Asiatick Society in Calcutta on 2 February 1786, he announced that the Sanskrit language shared with Latin and Greek “a stronger affinity...than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists”. We all will know of the fairy-tales of the brothers Grimm. Few, save for those of us who were perhaps introduced to it in diachronic or historical linguistics at university, will know of ‘Grimm’s Law’, formulated by the brother Jakob Grimm. The aim of historical linguistics is to describe changes in language and discover their causes. Grimm found a connection between a p in Latin (piscis) and an f in English (fish). He therefore concluded the German (vater), the English (father) and Sanskrit and Latin pitar/pater all share a common root. This may well be true, but it does not require the existence of a mythical language such as Indo-European in order to explain it. There are indeed many similarities between different languages that may indicate a common source. There is a fairly obvious resemblance between a word like brother and broeder (Dutch), Bruder (German), phrater (Greek), brat (Russian), bráthair (Irish), brawd (Welsh), and bhratar (Sanksrit). All the languages spoken around the world today will be traceable back to those spoken after the confusion of tongues at Babel. The likelihood is that there will have been far fewer languages then than there are today, simply because there were fewer people. Some estimates suggest that there would have been around 30,000 people alive at the time of the Tower of Babel. Similarities of vocabulary are subject to any number of explanations. To base arguments on changing vocabulary is to use a most unstable aspect of language. Old words go, and are replaced by new ones without any obvious reason, they pass from language to language and then nearly always with a slightly different con-notation. Because a word appears in a number of different languages, let us say Indo-European ones, this is no guarantee that it was known to the speakers of a parent language; nor, should it appear, would its meaning necessarily have been precisely the same. We need to remember that as people spread out around the world, they will take with them words from the land of their origin and also take into their own language words from those they meet along the way. There are so many examples of this. Speaking once with a pastor from the New Caledonian islands of the Pacific, in their own indigenous language the words for knife and fork were similar to English, the reason for this he gave as being that they did not use such implements before the arrival of missionaries from Scotland. The same was also true of the word towzis which came to their islands along with trousers, which apparently they did not wear until after the arrival of the missionaries! That there will be structural or grammatical similarities across all the many different languages is hardly surprising and is grounded in the nature of language itself. The capacity for language and the functioning of the mind is something intrinsic within the human nature God created and so is common to all men. It is related to our facility to make sense of what we observe in the universe around us, to see relationships and to draw conclusions, to formulate thought and then to express that thought. As far as I am aware, there exists not one physical artefact indicating that such a people as the Indo-Europeans ever existed. There is nothing apart from this speculative extrapolation backwards of similarities and common linguistic elements between languages. The application of a little imagination to some fifty ‘prehistoric’ vocabularies has led to the reconstruction of the lifestyle of this mythical group of tribes. Supposing they did exist, they are almost certainly to have been the descendants of Japheth. If one assumes the flood to have taken place about halfway through the third millennium, then the confusion of tongues will have followed possibly one hundred years later, or just a little more - we can calculate this approximately from the Bible statement that ‘the earth was divided’ in the lifetime of Peleg, who was a son of Eber, the great-grandson of Shem (Genesis 10:25). The earliest documented languages, in what is called the Indo-European group, are in Indian, Hittite, and Greek, and they are thought to have possessed identifiable individual characteristics soon after the middle of the second millennium B.C. This allows a fairly long and acceptable time of around a thousand years to pass during which they could develop. This is in line with the older view of historical linguists that the Indo-European community and its language were still intact at a time shortly after the Flood or just after. Whilst to a large degree these speculations and their links with early writings do not necessarily conflict entirely with the Scripture account, no one can really say with any certainty that they are true. The fact is that they tell us very little. Reflecting on the way in which unbelievers struggle to find an explanation of the origins of their own life and existence, Martin Luther wrote when commenting on Genesis 10.
For an account of how we all came to speak different languages and the reason for it, we need to turn to Genesis chapters 10 and 11. We discover that the introduction of many languages was both to bind people together in families and nations, but also to keep them apart. We must now ask to what end God did this, and what it says about the preaching of the Gospel in our own day. At first, Genesis 10 appears to be an endless genealogy with little to say to us, but it would be a mistake to pass over it, it is a most essential chapter. Indeed, without this chapter an understanding of God’s dealings with the nations in the rest of the Bible would elude us. The world is divided into three parts according to the three sons of Noah, from whom all humanity is descended. The first division is that inhabited by the descendants of Japheth, the eldest son, the most numerous. More can be gleaned about these families from Ezekiel 38. From Japheth have come the Gentile nations in general, those countries with which we are ourselves most familiar, along with northern Asia - the Indo-Europeans. The second division is generally what we would call Africa and this was given to Ham. Ham lives in hostility primarily to the godly family line of Shem. He possessed Palestine down the Euphrates and Egypt was in his hands. In these lands godless power later established itself through the force of Nimrod, who brought man and beast under his yoke. The descendants of Ham were not satisfied with what God had allotted them but encroached upon the inheritance of both Shem and Japheth. This is ever the beginning of godless rule, to throw off those limitations put in place by God, of being covetous of what He has given to others. Ham has been cursed by his father Noah, but Shem and Japheth blessed. It would appear from the subsequent events that the opposite occurred. Ham’s son, Canaan, takes possession of the best part of the earth. In chapter 11 we discover that despite the awful wickedness and tyranny of the day, there was also much faith and godliness. After the flood one can imagine that for some considerable time, with the memory of God’s terrible judgement still fresh in their memories, men lived in relative harmony. Ham was the first to disturb the peace, taking pleasure in his father’s downfall and sin. Rather than covering his naked, drunken father, showing respect, he derides him, takes delight in revealing the news to his brothers. He leaves his father and two godly brothers and begins to build a kingdom for himself. His eldest son presents him with a grandson, Nimrod. Finally, we come to Shem, father of the Hebrews, through whom the covenant was to be established. Shem is referred to as “father of all the children of Eber” (10:21). Doubtless, this is from where the name ‘Hebrews’ came. The prominent reference to Eber is clearly to show that from his line the Lord Jesus would be born. The third part of the world that was assigned to Shem included Palestine, but also Persia. We see in these two chapters the universal development of a new form of evil, that of idolatry, the worship of false gods. It penetrates even the family of Shem.
These chapters are not in chronological order. Chapter 11 tells of the building of the tower of Babel and its aftermath, chapter 10 lists the posterity of Noah by families and nations. In chapter 10 we find the first listing of nations, “after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations” (vv.5, 20, 31). Similar expressions to this will be found throughout Scripture, right through to the book of Revelation. After Babel, men were to live together as nations according to their family, their language, in the place appointed to them by God. Let us remember that this remains the arrangement for men to this day and it is reiterated in the New Testament by the apostle Paul, who also gives us the reason.
Whatever our family background, whatever our race, our nationality, we are blood relatives, and ought to regard each other as such. At the same time we are to retain that which is distinctive. We are to live as families and as nations for as long as God has previously determined, speaking our various languages, and living together in the place He has appointed, right across the whole face of the earth. Why are men to live like this, even today?
The reason for the divinely appointed arrangement of living as distinct nations is to the end that men should seek and find God. The dilution or destruction of nations is a hallmark of godless rebellion. The goal of sinful rebellious men moves in the opposite direction; they still seek strength in uniting together in defiance of God. The desire of men has ever been to dispense with God, not only in the world of thought and morals, but in every sphere of life. He would determine what is right and wrong based on purely personal criteria. Even as the pursuit of science is for its own sake, also art for art’s sake, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, so too political power provides its own justification. These are all thought of as autonomous spheres with no extraneous reference, certainly none to God. The exercise of political power insisting upon autonomy and independence from God is an expression of man’s sinful heart. Every man is his own god, his own world, no one outside himself has the right to judge him for what he does, says, or thinks - we are all entitled to our own opinion! Sinful men set their own standards, autonomy means literally the law of self. Men erroneously assume that by declaring themselves free of God they can escape His righteous judgement. Secular authority is not derived from within itself whatever the political system. Political power does not reside in the ruler himself, nor is it given to him by common consent, but, whatever the political system, accord-ing to Scripture, it is ordained of God in both its extent and limitations (see Romans 13:1-7). Its role is largely that of keeping order and punishing wrong-doers, levying taxes to that purpose. The modern idolatrous state sees itself, not God, as its own source of power and there is no nook nor cranny of our everyday life where it does not feel able to intervene. Jesus reminded Pilate that power was his only by God’s gift.
All human authority is derived from God. No human authority has limitless jurisdiction. We are under no obligation to obey human laws that bring us into conflict with the Word of God, for men have no authority from God to make such laws. Peter and the apostles reminded the Jewish council that they had no authority from God to forbid the preaching of the Gospel - nor, indeed, do any magistrates today.
Human authority that does not recognise the derivative nature of political power provides opportunity for tyranny and on a global scale this leads to global tyranny. We find that Nimrod’s name does not appear among the rest of the sons of Cush. Luther makes the interesting suggestion that he was the child of a harlot. There is significantly, some mystery about his precise origin. We are told, he “began to be a mighty one in the earth’ (10:8). He used tyranny to gain sovereignty and this will not have been without murder and bloodshed. He is a might hunter, “before the Lord” (10:9). The sin involved in building the tower of Babel is described for us (11:4).
This was a clear contempt for God, rebellion against Him. Nimrod and his associates would not accept any name, any authority above their own. These men would rule the world not for God, not even for their peoples, but for themselves. God could easily have sent fire from heaven, although He had committed Himself never to flood the world again, but His solution was a very straightforward one. God simply made it impossible for men to speak with each other. Evidently, this took place on the basis of families and groups of families so that the plan to band together in rebellion was brought to naught and global domination was prevented. The effect was that grad-ually the separate groups drifted apart and populated the world as God intended. Although God’s intervention in the division of tongues may at first appear to be something slight, it must have had immediate and devastating consequences. Speaking different languages has a twofold contradictory effect. A common language, first of all, binds together those speaking it, even as do local dialects of the same language. Second, different languages set men apart from each other. Where language differs, it is not long before men begin to despise and even hate each other. A foreign tongue makes commerce and trade difficult, communications of all kinds are hindered. Clearly, God was not going to allow Nimrod’s rebellion to succeed and this was the way He chose to ensure such an attempt would not easily be repeated. The tower was to reach to heaven, the implication God was dwelling close to it. Not only does Nimrod want to be mighty in government, but also he wanted to rule in religion. Those who strive for domination over and above that apportioned to them by God in civil and earthly matters will very soon begin to dominate in matters of faith, seeking to crush the righteous, the people of God. They will demand of us worship and honour that belongs only to God. That which is righteous and good before God, they will regard as evil and unrighteous, and evil they will exalt as good. Nimrod was the first man after the flood to strive for sovereignty over the whole world, to sit on the throne reserved for the Son of God. He is therefore an antichrist, a type of the Wicked One, the Man of the Earth, the Mighty Man, the Head over many countries, the King of Babylon, the wilful King, the Man of Sin, the Son of perdition, the Antichrist, yet to be revealed. The gathering in New York of the leaders of the nations under the banner of the United Nations and the talk of international criminal courts ought to fill us with more than some misgiving, but on the other hand with a heightened expectancy of the Lord’s return. That which is taking place in Europe among the countries of the European Union also gives us much cause for concern. These reprobate rulers acknowledge no authority higher than their own and require all nations to submit to it. Those who do not do so can expect continual physical force to be used against them. What transpires on an international level reaches us as individuals through the various directives from the UN or the EU, or in charters of rights incorp-orated into national law or more often made to override it. They interfere with our family life, education, employment, church life, nothing escapes. These institutions arrogate to themselves a power and jurisdiction over every detail of our lives, some-thing not given to them by God. It is the Babylonian perspective, the rebellion of Nimrod. They would build their global village, their city, their tower, to reach unto heaven. Though these men may hate and despise each other, yet they are made friends, as were Herod and Pilate, in the hatred reserved for the One to whom alone is given all authority, who “cometh with ten thousands of his saints” in judgement and to rule in equity.
Human governments who enter into dispute with God must not think in their sinful arrogance that they can act with impunity. Ungodly men of today will not escape the judgement of God anymore than did the men of Babel. Whilst being full of bravado wicked men are equally full of fear. Whilst the sinner is busy with his sinning, he does not think of God, he blots him from his consciousness. In doing this he assumes either that God cannot see what he is doing, or if He can, He doesn’t care.
In Genesis 11:5 we read,
Here we read that God comes down as though He were not previously there. God comes down, the sin of man has gone far enough, intervention is nigh. Men disregard God’s Word, act as though He did not exist. How long, we ask, will it be before God’s wrath is poured out upon those who think that God is dead, that He does not see what they are up to, that they can plot to rule and dominate the world, eradicate the truth, persecute the godly? In a moment when they think they are safe, then it is that disaster will overtake them. Suddenly the God who was nowhere to be seen is every-where. The God who slept is awake, seeing everything, His wrath burns, rages, slays all in its path. God, of course, is everywhere and all the time, - God ‘comes down’ in that He no longer overlooks that upon which He previously seemed to turn His back. This same idea is also expressed in a slightly different way in Acts 17:30.
So God will visit our generation, should men not forestall Him by repentance and faith in His Son. When God appears to pay no attention to sin, that He ‘winks’ at it, rest assured there will follow a formidable wrath. God came down that He might see, although up to this point it appeared that He did not. Can the wrath of God be placated? Only by an application of the blood of Christ can this happen, only as men and women forsake their sin and come to faith in Christ. This is the Gospel that should ring out across our lands today, not the insipid sanitised non-gospel blathered in its stead. A wave of lawlessness, of universal decadence, has swept relentlessly across Western nations taking all before it; the protection rather than the prosecution of wrongdoers characterises our system of justice; a vehement and belligerent conformity to godless fashions of the day, often under the patronage of governments, has permeated every part of our lives. It may seem for the present that God is inactive and that evil men prosper at the expense of the godly. Judgement can take many forms. Apart from the direct intervention by God, which may in His mercy be delayed, far worse is that those nations who refuse the Gospel may be denied the opportunity to hear it further. Where today are the preachers of yesteryear wooing men to Christ? Not only is the Gospel denied them, but God sends
In the end God gives men a desire not for the truth, but in its place, a hunger for apostate religion, and for lying wonders. The end of all rebellion against God is insanity and blasphemy. So we have rolling about on the floor, barking like dogs, clucking like chickens, falling-over backwards, fake healings, and all kinds of madness, parading as the worship of our sovereign God. This too is the judgement of God on a godless people. Pray rather that God should send floods and pestilence, a famine rather, for this would be a reminder of God’s wrath and His mercy, that the door is yet open. Pray rather that He would send fire from heaven, for it would be an act of His grace as a reminder to us of hell and an invitation to flee from the wrath to come! Pray rather that God should visit us in these kinds of ways than that He should deprive us of that powerful Gospel preaching which is the greatest blessing God can ever bestow on a nation, even as its replacement by a growth in apostasy is the greatest of all possible national calamities.
There is prosperity for the Gospel where rulers are brought to recognise that...
Those who refuse will be humbled like Nebuchadnezzar through judgement to
One day it will happen, in that city which needs neither sun nor moon, for it is lightened by the glory of God and the light of the Lamb.
This was always God’s intention for them did men but know it. What mad foolishness is it that causes them to throw it all away? Shall not the One who gave the many tongues spoken by the peoples of the world also understand and be able to speak to us in that language which He created? Unbelievers view the development of languages as being contingent and devoid of any underlying and intelligent unity linking them together. The Bible teaches the inherent created unity of the human race, of all men being created in the image of God and sharing an innate propensity for language as a gift of God. The diversity of language that came at Babel does not erase this common factor in human language. It is essential to accurate translation. Indeed, without this under-lying unity we would not be able to communicate with each other in our own language let alone with those speaking other languages. As part of the image of God in man, the functioning of a common human consciousness enables us to understand each other and even to benefit from knowledge gained in generations previous to our own through the medium of the recorded language, which is what writing really is. The gift of language enables us to think about God and have communion with Him and with other human beings. We share with all men a common paradigm of perception, thought, and language as part of our make-up. These must of necessity be the same in all men, although the ‘flesh’ on these ‘bones’ will differ from language to language. Therefore we have no problem in asserting that the Word of God is the same in any language. The ungodly deny creation, and most deny that the ability to learn and use language is innate, but claim it is socially acquired. They deny the providence of God guiding all things to His ends, claiming that language is the product of chance with no purpose other than an immediate one of social necessity. They thus destroy the possibility of any precise identity in two different languages. It is this upon humanistic assumption that those build who say that translations of the Bible must necessarily be imperfect and so God has not given us His Word in English without error. Accordingly, God
too must then be subject to the contingent laws of language develop-ment and can
have exerted no power over it in order to provide us with His Word in our own
language that we might be saved. We must reject this shifting sand of unbelief
and build upon another foundation. God has more interest than we have in ensuring
that His Word comes to us in a form that is perfect for that purpose to which
He has ordained it. He has watched over His Word, even as He has prepared the
vehicle in which His Word is to be carried to those who need it; namely, the many
tongues of men.
4.1.3 The Gospel is to men of every kindred, tongue, people, and nation. On the cross Pilate, civil representative of the nations, wrote a title: JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. In John’s record we are told that many of the Jews read it, and that it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin. The Lord Jesus is the only Saviour of men and this was now to be made known not only among the Jewish nation but among all nations. What we must now ask ourselves is how the Word of God is to be brought to those of different nations, therefore of different tongues, until the end of the world. This Word must be in a permanent form, it must therefore be written. It must also be available in languages understandable to those for whom it is intended. In saying that the Gospel is to be brought to all nations until the end of the world, the Scriptures are themselves telling us that they must needs be available in many different tongues. The apostles stood in a different relation to inspiration than do we. Inspiration is for us something in the past and we stand outside it. The Jews of the apostles’ day were under the impression that divine inspiration had long ceased, perhaps as many as four centuries previously. Among the apostles, however, the promise our Lord had made to them was that the Holy Spirit would resume His working, albeit in a new and different way. Certainly, after the day of Pentecost they lived in the light of a new reality. This same power of God was that which had worked in previous times and as a result of which had come the Old Testament Scriptures. They were living in a situation in which we do not live, in which the writing of Scripture was to continue. Despite this, they were still bound to the Scripture as indeed was the Lord Jesus Himself. The tendency to withdraw from Scripture for an individualistic mysticism to go ‘back to the Holy Spirit’ is not something that can be maintained by any true believer. Many who seek today to withdraw into ‘spiritual mysticism’ at the expense of Scripture, accusing those who insist upon one authentic written Word as being guilty of ‘bibliolatry’, thereby begin to fall into the contradiction of measuring by two standards. As it is Christ Jesus who is revealed in Scripture, it is to set Him aside. The Holy Spirit would come for one reason. Says the Lord Jesus,
This the Holy Spirit did in revealing ‘of mine’ to the apostles, which they then recorded for the benefit of succeeding generations of saints. Not one word of the New Testament was written before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Gathering together in one place, suddenly a great sound was heard coming from above, like a violent wind blowing. Cloven tongues like fire sat upon the head of each of them, they were filled with the Hol |