Don't Get Mad...Get Leavin'--Sermon on the Mount Series

            There are certain activities in life that can really get my competitive juices flowing—like mini-golf, for example, or bowling, ping-pong, and tennis. I can also get very competitive when I play board games, which has often made me wonder how I’m going to react when Adrianna reaches that age when she will want to change the rules of every game so that she can win.

            That’s actually an attitude that we all struggle with in our lives—we want to define the standards of life so that we come out looking good. That’s exactly what the Pharisees in Jesus’ day had done with God’s commandments in the Old Testament. The Pharisees, you will remember, were basically the pastors of the Jewish people at that time, and in a time when people did not have their own copies of the Old Testament to read, the Pharisees functioned for many people as the official interpreters of God’s commands.

            Ironically, their efforts to interpret God’s commands came from a sincere desire to follow them closely, but what their efforts produced was a set of arbitrary guidelines that did not capture the heart of God’s commands, yet they allowed the Pharisees to tell themselves that they were being perfectly obedient.

            In Matthew 5:17-20, we saw Jesus launch the opening volley of a thorough attack on the Pharisees’ mindset and traditions. Beginning now in v. 21, we will see him discuss some specific examples from the Pharisees’ traditions and reveal how those examples fail to capture the true spirit of God’s commands. He begins with their interpretations of God’s commandments against murder. Let’s read all that He has to say here about this subject, then we’ll break it down a bit more [READ Matthew 5:21-26]. Let’s look at a few points in this text, then we’ll discuss some implications of Jesus’ teaching.

            Notice how Jesus says in v. 21, “You have heard that it was said to those of old.” That’s an important phrase because it reminds us that Jesus is not critiquing the Old Testament itself—He is critiquing what the Pharisees had said about the Old Testament; their interpretation of it. When Jesus referred to the Old Testament itself, He would say something like “it is written” or “haven’t you read…,” so this little phrase reminds us that Jesus was exposing the Pharisees’ teaching, not any deficiency in the Old Testament itself.

            Notice also that Jesus countered that phrase with the phrase in v. 22, “But I say to you.” That little phrase made two very important points. First, Jesus was clearly setting himself up for the people as an alternative to the Pharisees. It becomes crystal clear in the rest of the sermon that Jesus wants the people to accept his teaching as authoritative rather than the teaching of the Pharisees, and this little phrase effectively puts the people at a fork in the road. What are you going to follow—that which was said to those of old, or that which I say to you?

            Second, with this little phrase, Jesus was claiming to have the authority to accurately express the mind of God. That’s an incredible claim that lays the groundwork for Jesus’ later claims that He is God. This point was not lost on Jesus’ audience, because Matthew reports at the end of this sermon that “the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes (Matt 7:28-29).”

Now let’s take a look at some implications from Jesus’ teaching.

1. Don’t use superficial standards to assess your relationships with other people.

            What the Pharisees taught about murder was okay as far as it went, but as Jesus reveals, it didn’t go far enough. Their teaching was, “You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.” God certainly did condemn murder through His commands, but He went beyond that to the very root of murder, which is anger. In Leviticus 19:17, the Lord said, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart,” but that point was apparently lost on the Pharisees, which is why Jesus criticizes their teaching here. Their traditions focused only on an external action like murder, and apparently, to them, any attitudes or even actions that stopped short of murder were okay.

            But Jesus declares that the mere attitude of anger is just as serious in God’s eyes as the act of murder itself, and actions like insults that we might think are less serious than murder are actually serious enough to make us deserving of Hell. That is a very penetrating assessment that calls us to consider not just our external actions toward others, but the attitudes that we hold about them in our hearts.

            This lesson holds an important implication for the way that we assess our relationships with each other. Let’s face it—its so easy for us to excuse anger in our hearts by looking only at superficial standards. Perhaps I’ve been angry at someone for a year but I’ve told myself, “What’s the big deal? I’ve never punched him! I’ve never slashed his tires!” Well, what a wonderful person I am! Let me pat myself on the back because I haven’t punched someone!

            But Jesus says we had better stop patting ourselves on the back and we better start examining our hearts, because the attitudes we harbor there are just as serious as if we had murdered someone. And if we have expressed our anger to another person through even something as “small” as an insult, Jesus instructs us to make it our top priority to ask forgiveness from that person.

2. If you have expressed your anger against someone else, make it your top priority to ask for their forgiveness.

            The Lord uses a very vivid example to get this point across. He was speaking at a time when the Jewish people were still offering animal sacrifices in accordance with the Old Testament laws, and He tells His audience that if they were standing at the altar of sacrifice, preparing to hand their sacrifice over to the priest, and they remembered that they had expressed their anger to someone else, they should immediately stop this ritual of worship and leave to go and be reconciled with that person.

            In other words, anger is such a serious matter that if I’ve expressed it against another person, I must make it my top priority to make things right with that person. It should even be a higher priority than performing a ritual of worship to God, and the reason for that is simple—God won’t be pleased by my ritual of worship if I am not at peace with other people. As Samuel explained to King Saul in 1 Samuel 15:22, “to obey is better than sacrifice.”

            So imagine that you are driving to church one Sunday morning when you remember that you had insulted someone the previous week and had not yet asked for their forgiveness. It would actually be a greater act of worship to go and make things right with that person than to come to church. That is the kind of priority that we should give to confessing our anger to the people whom we’ve hurt and asking their forgiveness.

Jesus gives us a further illustration of the urgency of making things right at the end of this section.

3. It is much easier to be reconciled to someone sooner rather than later.

            This lesson is the point of Jesus’ words about the judge and the guard and the prison. Some people have wanted to conclude that Jesus was telling a parable here with the judge standing for God and the prison standing for Hell, but there doesn’t seem to be any need to make that connection. Jesus is simply pointing to real-life circumstances to encourage us to make peace with other people quickly after an offense has taken place.

            Its never easy to swallow your pride, confess your sin, and ask someone else to forgive you, but it is almost always easier to do so soon after an offense rather than later. Its just like a physical illness in many ways—if you deal with it in its earliest stages, your odds of beating it are much greater.

            Proverbs 18:19 describes how difficult it can be to reconcile with someone you’ve sin against: “A brother offended is more unyielding than a strong city, and quarreling is like the bars of a castle.” That observation only becomes more and more applicable with each passing day after an offense has taken place.

With each day that passes, you better believe that Satan is hard at work to multiply the offenses and misunderstandings between you and that other person. He’s going to tempt that person every day to become more bitter, to build more bars around their heart so that you can no longer get in.

            So my friends, we must realize what a serious matter anger truly is. In the eyes of God, it is every bit as serious as murder, and when we have succumbed to it and expressed it against others, we must make it our top priority to heal that breach in our relationship quickly before Satan has time to exploit it. Obeying God in this matter is actually a greater act of worship than any ritual that we might perform, such as attending church, praying, or singing hymns. And if we know we’ve expressed anger toward someone else and we’ve not yet made our peace with them, God won’t be pleased with our rituals of worship, anyway!

            Now, let me answer a question that may have popped into your mind at this point—do I need to confess my anger to another person if its only been in my heart and I haven’t expressed it to them? That’s a good question, and I think the answer is a cautious “no,” and I say “cautious” because we need to remember that there are many ways in which we can express our anger beyond just the obvious ones like assaulting someone.

            Let me describe a scenario to help us think about this question. Suppose that I get a text message from Carmen one afternoon that says, “I made plans for us to go over to Billy Bob’s house tonight. Hope you don’t mind!” Now suppose that I start to think, “Oh man! There’s a big KU basketball game on tonight, and Billy Bob is a K-State fan so I know he won’t want to watch the game. How could Carmen be so inconsiderate? She’s just always thinking about herself and what she wants to do! You know, I remember a time six years ago when she did the same thing! This is twice now in six years! This is becoming a bad pattern in her life! She’s ALWAYS doing this kind of thing!”

            Now imagine that I allow myself to go on like this for a few minutes, just stewing in my anger. Then the Holy Spirit convicts me, and I repent of my anger and put it away. Would I need to confess that anger to Carmen? I think the answer is no, because I haven’t expressed it to her in any way. I still need to confess it to God and ask for His forgiveness, but I don’t think I would need to ask for Carmen’s forgiveness in that situation.

            Now suppose, however, that I held on to my anger until I got home. Perhaps I don’t say anything about it, but instead I just don’t say much of anything at all. I don’t give Carmen my normal greeting, and instead I just get ready to go over to Billy Bob’s house. Then I joke around with Billy Bob for a couple of hours, and we leave to go home and I’m silent again. We arrive at home and I just get ready for bed and go to sleep.

            Now would I need to confess my anger to Carmen in that situation? You bet I would, but why? How did I express it to her? First of all, Carmen knows that its out of character for me to be quiet like that and say nothing at all. She’s would know that something is wrong, and I’ve probably caused her some worry by leaving her in the dark about what it could be. Second, even though I didn’t say any harsh words to her, I didn’t speak any kind words to her either. I know I should speak kind words to her, and James 4:17 says “whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”

            Third, I am commanded to love my wife, but just think about the definition of love from 1 Corinthians 13. Love is patient—have I been patient? No! Love is kind—have I been kind? No! Love is not rude—have I been rude? Yes! Love is not irritable—have I been irritable? Yes!

            You see, we have to remember all of the subtle ways in which we can express anger. Remember the first implication from today’s sermon—don’t use superficial standards to assess your relationships with other people! In that light, we probably need to confess our anger to others more often that we might initially realize. Are there times when it may not be necessary? I think there are, but they probably occur less often than we want to admit.

            Its never very hard for us to find ways to excuse our behavior, is it? We’re just like children playing a board game—we can always find a way to adjust the rules so that we come out on top. But my friends, we must not play that game. That is precisely the mindset that Jesus is going to dismantle here in The Sermon on the Mount, and He has begun with the ways in which we might justify our sinful anger against other people. We must take a sober look at ourselves in the penetrating light of God’s Word and allow it to reveal our hearts as they really are.

            If know that you need to make peace with someone because you’ve expressed anger against them, don’t delay. Don’t wait another day; don’t leave yourself or your neighbor vulnerable to Satan’s temptations. Do what you can to repair that breach, and pray for God to help your neighbor to be willing to do the same.

Probable "Cause?" Why the Difference in Translations of Matthew 5:22? Part 2--Sermon on the Mount Series

            Last week, we began to discuss the history of how the Bible has come from the pens of the original authors down through the years to us today. We talked about the important doctrine called inerrancy, which is the belief that the original documents of Scripture contained no errors and no lies. Now, to our knowledge, the original pieces of paper on which the Bible was written no longer exist, because they’ve simply worn out over time. Don’t let that thought trouble you, however, because basically no pieces of paper from that long ago still exist—they’ve worn out and disintegrated.

            I’ll bet some of you have a book that was owned by your grandparents, and I’ll bet that book has at least started to wear out. Now consider this—your grandparents’ book has probably been in your house, which means its likely been out of direct sunlight that could have caused it to fade. Also, for several decades at least, its been in an air-conditioned room, which means it was in relatively low humidity. And yet, its still at least started to wear out. Well, now imagine pieces of paper from 2,000-4,000 years ago that didn’t have those advantages. As we would expect, they would just wear out.

            So, to the best of our knowledge, the original documents of Scripture no longer exist, but what we do possess are copies of the Bible—in fact, we have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of copies of the Bible from over the centuries, some of which were written relatively soon after the original documents were written.

            Now as I also mentioned last week, those copies of the Bible don’t always agree about how a certain verse should be worded—which leaves us with questions like our question about Matthew 5:22 that led to this whole discussion. Today, we’re going to talk more about those differences. We’ll discover that those differences affect a relatively small number of verses and none of them undermine any central point of the Christian faith. In other words, we don’t find some copies that say, “Jesus rose from the dead” and other copies that say, “Ha ha—just kidding, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.” But there are differences that exist between these copies, and critics of Christianity love to point that out, but we’ll see today that we really have no reason to be concerned about the text of the Bible that we hold in our hands in our copies today.

            Our discussion today is going to focus on the copies of the New Testament. The Old Testament has its own history since it has been preserved by two religions—Judaism and Christianity. Also, critics of Christianity really don’t pick on the Old Testament that much. If you hear someone on The History Channel talking about errors in the copies of the Bible, they will almost certainly be talking about the New Testament, so that’s what we will focus on today.

            Let’s return now to the outline that I introduced last week. Point #1 was this—the original documents of Scripture were written without any errors. We’ll move now to…

2. As people began to copy the original documents, they sometimes made innocent mistakes or inserted words to help clarify a statement.

            What kind of mistakes are we talking about? Let’s discuss a few…

a. Mistakes in spelling

            In many cases, this was probably the result of a copyist confusing letters that look very similar. Think about how easy it would be in English to confuse two “v”’s that are side-by-side with a “w.”

b. Eyes jumping down the page of the original copy

            We commit that mistake ourselves at times, and it would have been easier for some copyists to make that mistake since the earliest copies of Scripture were written INALLCAPITALLETTERSWITH NOSPACESBETWEENTHEWORDS.

c. Confusing different letters or words that sound similar

            We know from historical records that people would sometimes read the text of Scripture and have several people copy it at once. That’s a little more efficient in a situation when everything has to be copied by hand, but that introduces the possibility of some other mistakes. Imagine if we were copying an English document that way and we came to the word “there” or the word “to.” Think about how often people misspell those words!

d. Faulty memory

            By this I mean a copyist forgetting something during the time it takes to look at the original copy and then write out what was on that page. This would seem to account for some of the differences in minor details that we see between some copies.

Now my outline also noted deliberate insertions that were sometime made in the text, so what kind of insertions are we talking about?

a. Changes in spelling and grammar

            Think about the way that English is spoken differently even within our own country. In some places, people say “pop,” but in other places they say “soda.” In some places, its fine to say “ain’t” even though English teachers don’t like it. Well, the same situation was true with the Greek in the New Testament, and in some copies we see copyists cleaning up spelling or grammar that apparently seemed wrong to them.

b. Changes to harmonize stories found in more than one book

            In the gospels in particular, we find stories that are recorded in more than one book, but frequently the authors emphasized and included different details. But sometimes, we find copyists who were apparently trying to make Luke and Matthew’s account of a story read exactly the same, so they added a detail from Matthew’s account into Luke’s account or vice versa.

c. The addition of words frequently found together

            The most common example of this kind of addition is with the words “Lord Jesus Christ.” You’re probably familiar with some verses that refer to the Son of God simply as Jesus or as Christ or as the Christ. Well, some copyists had a habit of writing out Lord Jesus Christ in all of those verses, even if their original copy didn’t necessarily have all of those words.

d. Changes made for doctrinal sensitivity

            We see a clear example of this in the birth narratives of Christ, where some copyists made slight changes to avoid calling Joseph the father of Jesus. Apparently, their concern was to remind us that Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus and that Jesus, or course, was born of a virgin.

e. Addition of miscellaneous details

            This habit has produced some humorous results in various copies of Scripture. For example, in Revelation 4:8, when the living creatures in Heaven sing, “holy, holy, holy,” a few manuscripts have the creatures singing “holy” four times, six times, eight times, or all the way up to 13 times!

            The title of the Book of Revelation has also been expanded in some copies over time. The earliest copies simply call it “The Revelation of John.” Later, after John was declared a saint by the Catholic Church, some copyists changed it to “The Revelation of St. John. Eventually, there was one over-achieving copyist who called it “The Revelation of the all-glorious Evangelist, bosom friend of Jesus, beloved to Christ, John the theologian, son of Salome and Zebedee, but adopted son of Mary the Mother of God, and Son of Thunder!”

            Now, it is very important to realize that we don’t even find notable mistakes and insertions in very many verses of Scripture. Let me explain—in the Greek New Testament that has been compiled by comparing all of the ancient copies with each other, there are 138,020 words. In that whole document, there are only 10,000 places where notable differences exist between the ancient copies. That ratio equates to roughly 1% of the text. In other words, for 99% of the text of the New Testament, there are no notable differences between the ancient copies. That’s an incredible fact when you consider that we have over 5,000 ancient manuscripts of the Bible!

Even for that 1% of the text, point #3 of our outline is true…

3. By comparing the numerous ancient copies of Scripture that we possess, we can spot those mistakes and insertions and correct them.

            When there is a notable difference between the ancient copies of the New Testament, we are normally left with a situation like what I’ve portrayed in your bulletin handout for today. Normally, we will find many manuscripts that have exactly the same reading. Then, we will find some that have some of the various mistakes or insertions that we just discussed.

            Now notice one thing about my little illustration here—do you still get the same basic message from all of these statements? Of course you do! So for this very small percentage of the text where we find a notable difference between the copies, our doubt really isn’t about the message of the verse, just the exact, original wording of the verse. Also, its not that we’ve lost the original words of Scripture—one of the variations surely must capture the original wording, we’re just less than 100% sure about which variation that is.

            So remember, we’re only talking about 1% of the text—about 10,000 places. And in the vast majority of those places, we have a high degree of certainty about which of the variations captures the original wording. Evangelical scholar Norman Geisler concludes that there are only 40 places out of those 10,000 where we truly have significant doubt about which variation captures the original wording. We know one of them must, we’re just really not sure which one. And again, we’re only talking about 40 places out of the entire New Testament. As Dr. Geisler likes to say, we have 100% of the text, and we are sure about 99.5% of it.¹

So for that small number of places, point #4 of our outline is true…

4. In some verses, the exact wording of the original documents remains uncertain. This uncertainty is one factor that lies behind the differences we find between translations.

            These differences show up primarily between the King James and New King James Version on the one hand and new translations such as the English Standard Version on the other. When the King James Version was written in 1611, the translators obviously could only work with the Greek manuscripts that had been discovered at that time. In the 400 years since then, archaeologists have discovered many more manuscripts, and newer translations have been able to take those into account when they make decisions about that small number of places where we find significant differences.

            This is not to say that the King James and New King James Versions are poor translations—not at all! Remember, we’re talking about a very small number of places, and its possible in some of those places that the King James has it right and the newer translations have it wrong!

            So how should we sum up all of this information? First, we must acknowledge that there are differences between the ancient copies of the New Testament. That’s true, and we need to acknowledge that its true. We need to get out ahead of skeptics who only mention this tiny part of the whole picture. Some people have their faith shaken when they learn about these differences because they learn about them from a skeptic who only mentions part of the story. Worse yet, some people conclude that their church has been deliberately hiding this information from them. All of this confusion is totally unnecessary because Christians have nothing to hide about the Bible, especially after we hear the whole story.

            So yes, there are differences between the ancient copies of Scripture, but the vast majority of them are insignificant. They consist of spelling mistakes and other mistakes that are easily spotted and corrected when we compare the ancient copies with one another. And among the 40 or so places where we do have a fair degree of uncertainty about the wording of the original text, we know we possess the original wording in one of the copies, and none of those instances undermine a core doctrine of the Christian faith. We don’t find copies making different claims about the virgin birth of Christ, the deity of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, or salvation by grace through faith.

            Let me address one final question that arises from this whole discussion—why did God allow people to make mistakes as they copied the Bible? Why didn’t He just see to it that the copyists did their work perfectly? I think the answer is this—the fact that we do not find 100% uniformity between all the copies actually disproves a claim that many people have made about the Bible, namely, that there was a deliberate conspiracy in the past to change the teaching of the Bible. The fact that we find mistakes actually disproves that claim. Let me explain what I mean.

            Think about the difference between the produce that you grow in your garden and the produce that you see in the grocery store. When you harvest produce from your garden—say, tomatoes, for example—they don’t all look exactly the same, do they? They will be slightly different sizes and slightly different colors and some of them will have some flaws.

            But when you see tomatoes in the grocery store, what do you find? They all look exactly the same—they’re the same color, the same size, and the same shape. That uniformity tells us that there was a lot of human manipulation in the process of bringing those tomatoes to the grocery store. Someone threw out all the imperfect tomatoes and shipped out only the ones they wanted to have on display.

            Now, the fact that we don’t see complete uniformity in the copies of Scripture tells us that there has been no human manipulation over the copying process. If there was ever a conspiracy to change the message of Scripture, we would find uniformity in the copies because the conspirators would have destroyed all of the copies that they deemed imperfect. The history of the Bible as it stands shows us that there has never been centralized, human control over its copying and preservation.

            But consider this, even without that kind of centralized, human control over the copying process, we have received a Bible today that has no notable differences in over 99% of the text. I think we can conclude that God was overseeing the process, and He did so in a way that disproves the claims of those who want to attack the Bible.

            In the end, we can echo the words of the Apostle Paul from 1 Corinthians 1:20—“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Indeed He has!

Notes

1. Norman Geisler, When Skeptics Ask, p. 160.

Probable "Cause?" Why the Difference in Translations of Matthew 5:22?--Sermon on the Mount Series

            Today, before we tackle the next section of the Sermon on the Mount as a whole, we’re going to take an in-depth look at a question that arises from Matthew 5:21-22. Please follow along with me as I read those verses [READ Matthew 5:21-22]. Now, I just read those verses from the English Standard Version of the Bible, a fairly new English translation that came out in 2001. If you were following along in the King James Version or the New King James Version, you might be scratching your head, because both of those translations say, “whoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be in danger of the judgment.” Or, if you’re following along in the ESV or the NIV or the New American Standard, there may have been a little note in your Bible in the margin or at the bottom of the page that says something like, “some manuscripts insert without cause.”

            That is an interesting and important difference. Why do some translations read, “whoever is angry with his brother without cause” and other translations simply read, “whoever is angry with his brother?” That little difference has an impact on how we understand this passage, because one reading seems to allow for no exceptions whereas the other reading acknowledges that there could be situations in which anger is okay.

            So why do we find these differences between translations of the Bible? To answer that question, we need to talk about the history of how the Bible has come from the pens of Moses and Paul and others all the way down through the years to us in 2013. This discussion should boost your confidence in the Bible, especially in light of misinformation about this subject that is common in our world today.

            In our next two sermons, we’re going to work our way through the following outline, which will take us through the basics of the history of how the Bible came from God all the way down through the years to us:

1. The original documents of Scripture were written without any errors.

2. As people began to copy the original documents, they sometimes made innocent mistakes or inserted words to help clarify a statement.

3. By comparing the numerous ancient copies of Scripture that we possess, we can spot those mistakes and insertions and correct them.

4. In some verses, the exact wording of the original documents remains uncertain. This uncertainty is one factor that lies behind the differences we find between translations.

            I suspect that this information is very new for some of you, and for that reason, it could be easy for you to walk away from the next two sermons thinking, “Pastor Tim said there are errors in the Bible!” That is not at all what I’m saying, and its so important for you to realize that, that I’m going to spend the rest of our time today showing you that that’s not what I’m saying.

            We’re going to spend our time today looking at just the first point of the outline that I just gave you—the original documents of Scripture were written without any errors. In other words, the documents that were written by the hands of Moses and David and Peter and Paul and others contained nothing but the truth—no errors, no mistakes, no lies. The big, fancy term for this belief about the Bible is “inerrancy,” and I’m going to make a case for you this morning to show you why we have good reason to believe that the Bible tells us nothing but the truth.

So, we’re going to look at a few observations about the Bible and then draw the most reasonable conclusion from those observations.

1. The Bible is a communication from God given to us through men (2 Timothy 3:16)

            Its certainly true that human beings actually put pen to paper to write out the words of the Bible, but these men claimed that they were writing out a message from God, and we have good reasons to believe that claim. 2 Timothy 3:16 is a good place to find that claim. In the first phrase of that verse, Paul writes, “All Scripture is breathed out by God.” He is simply saying that God is the ultimate source of Scripture (which is just another term for the Bible).

            We have very good reasons to believe that claim—let me give you just one of them this morning. The Bible has shown the ability to accurately predict the specific actions of specific people hundreds of years before they happened. Now, we all know that humans don’t have that ability. We don’t always get it right when we predict how people are going to act next week, let alone hundreds of years down the road. But the Bible has shown that ability, which is a very good reason to conclude that God must have been the ultimate source of Scripture.

2. God directed those men as they wrote, and His direction extended to the tiniest details of their writings (Matthew 5:17-18)

            That last phrase is important, because if God’s guidance of those authors didn’t extend all the way down to the details, then we’re open to the possibility of human mistakes. But Jesus demonstrated an immense confidence in the tiniest details of Scripture, which tells us that God’s guidance must have extended down to the details.

            Consider a verse we read just last week—Matthew 5:18. In that verse, Jesus said, “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” We learned last week that the “iota” and the “dot” referred to the tiniest details of Scripture, and we can see what kind of confidence Jesus had in those details.

3. God knows all things; thus, He cannot make innocent mistakes in what He says.

            We’ve all had the experience of saying something that we thought was true, only to learn a little bit more and find out that we were wrong. I remember when I was in second or third grade and I was learning how to do division with remainders. You might remember that—you would figure out how many times a smaller number would go into a larger number, and anything left over was just called a remainder. Well, I had already seen some older kids doing math with decimal points, and I thought, “Ah! I see where we’re going here. I bet those decimal points are the same thing as a remainder.” Now, I wanted to show my teacher that I was way ahead of the game, so I did a whole assignment where I wrote out those remainders as decimal points instead of using that little “r” symbol. When I got that assignment back, my teacher had let me know with lots of red ink that a remainder is not the same thing as a decimal point.

            I had made a mistake because I thought something was true when in fact it was false. But think about this—since God knows all things, He’s not vulnerable to mistakes like that. He can’t be mistaken about something because He knows all things. So, when He says something, it must be free from any mistakes.

4. God cannot lie; thus, He cannot say something is true though He knows it to be false.

            Hebrews 6:18 makes this observation about God very clearly when it simply states, “…it is impossible for God to lie.” We can also approach this observation in a more philosophical way. Since God is the one who gave human beings our sense of morality, and since we understand intuitively that lying is wrong, then God must view lying as wrong, and thus He would not do it.

            Now think again about these observations: (1) The Bible is a communication from God given to us through men; (2) God directed those men as they wrote, all the way down to the tiniest details; (3) God knows all things, so He can’t be mistaken; and (4) God cannot lie. What we have to conclude about the Bible, then, is that it must be free from any errors or lies. In other words, everything in the Bible must be true.

            We can verify this conclusion by the fact that no one has ever proven a statement in the Bible to be wrong. Now this is the point, of course, when many people in our culture would throw up their hands and say, “Wait a minute! What about such and such a passage?” Certainly, people have suggested passages that they think are wrong, but no one has ever proven their case.

            Do keep one point in mind here—when we say that the Bible has no errors, we’re only talking about the original documents. People did commit errors as they copied those original documents, and that’s what we’ll talk about next week, but that’s not what we’re focusing on today—we’re focusing on those original documents. Particularly when someone makes a statement like, “the Bible has thousands of errors in it,” whether they realize it or not they’re referring to those copies of the Bible, not the original documents of Scripture.

            Let me give you a suggestion to keep in the back of your mind—the next time someone says to you, “the Bible has errors in it,” just ask them, “Are you thinking of any passage in particular?” The average Joe who says the Bible has errors in it is just repeating something he heard on The History Channel or on Facebook. He almost certainly hasn’t checked it out for himself, so just gently press him with that question, and don’t let him intimidate you with some statement like, “Everyone knows the Bible has errors in it!” Just keep bringing up that question—“are you thinking of any passage in particular?” If he does mention a particular passage, either help him understand that passage, or if you don’t understand it yourself, just say, “You know, that’s an interesting question about that passage. If you’re interested, I could do some homework on it and we could talk about it later.”

            Most of the time, however, that person will probably look like a deer in the headlights when you ask them if they’re thinking about any passage in particular. If they can’t name one, then you could say, “Why don’t you start reading through the Bible, and I’ll check in with you every so often, and if you find something you think is wrong, we can take a look at it together.” What a great opportunity if the person agrees to do that!

            Now, in the last hundred years or so, it has become sadly common for Christian people to modify the idea that the Bible has no errors or lies. We’ve been so intimated by ideas like the theory of evolution that some people have become willing to say, “Well, the Bible always gets it right when it talks about God and salvation, but it makes some errors when it talks about history or scientific stuff.”

            Sadly, quite a few denominations have been willing to make that compromise, but we run into a big problem when we take that step. There really is no way to separate what the Bible says about God and what it says about history (or “scientific stuff”) because the Bible is making claims about what God has done through history, as Lord of history. If the Bible states something about God by pointing to an event in history, but it turns out that that event never actually happened, then the statement about God just falls flat. We’re left with nothing more than fairy tales that have no basis in truth.

            The best example of this is the resurrection of Christ. I want to show you what Paul had to say about this matter in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 [READ 1 Cor. 15:12-19]. Notice that Paul did not say, “Well, if the resurrection didn’t actually happen, that’s no big deal because its still a good story about God that teaches us such and such.” No, he said that if the resurrection was not a real historical event, then he was telling lies about God and we’re all doomed! Those are the stakes, my friends—if the events recorded in the Bible did not actually take place, we’re not left with good, informative stories about God, we are left with lies about God.

            The importance of the doctrine of inerrancy was stated well by Augustine of Hippo, a bishop in northern Africa in the late 4^th and early 5^th centuries: “most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books. That is to say that the men by whom the Scripture has been given to us and committed to writing put down in these books anything false. If you once admit into such a high sanctuary of authority one false statement, there will not be left a single sentence of those books, which, if appearing to anyone difficult in practice or hard to believe, may not by the same fatal rule be explained away as a statement, in which intentionally, the author declared what was not true.”¹

            In other words, if you say that there is even one error in the Bible, you’ve declared open season on the whole thing. If there’s one error, why couldn’t there be two? And if two, then why not three, and so on? And when we run into a statement that is hard to believe or hard to live out, we can just write it off as an error and move on.

            Perhaps the real question that surrounds the issue of inerrancy is simply, “Who’s the boss?” Who’s the boss—me or the Bible? Do I stand as judge over the Bible, declaring where it is right and wrong, or does the Bible stand as judge over me, declaring where I am right and wrong? May we never establish ourselves as the judge over Scripture, but as this book can be shown to be a message from the true and living God, may we humble ourselves beneath it and declare that it tells us the truth, and nothing but the truth.

Notes:

1. As quoted in Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 91.