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 4th and early 5th
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.
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