24 ¶ For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory
of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof
falleth away: 25 But the word of the
Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached
unto you.
Our bodies are so temporary it is stunning to think about.
We are young and fit for such a short time. Youthful beauty and strength are
fleeting and temporary. Health and vitality last for a few short decades, if
that. Our body is a building, a vehicle that houses our soul. This one is temporary
but one is being prepared for us which is eternal, a building of God.
2Corinthians 5: 1 ¶
For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved,
we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens. 2 For in this we groan,
earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven:
3 If so be that being clothed we shall
not be found naked. 4 For we that are in
this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed,
but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.
Here, the Holy Spirit, using Peter, who is writing from his
own thinking and in his own style, but guided by the Spirit of God, links the
Old Testament passage quoted in the opening of Matthew and Mark to herald John
the Baptist’s presentation of Christ.
Isaiah 40: 3 ¶ The voice of him that crieth in the
wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a
highway for our God. 4 Every valley
shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the
crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: 5 And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.
6 The voice said, Cry. And he said, What
shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all
the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: 7 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:
because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.
8 The grass withereth, the flower
fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
The words of God endure forever and these are the words
spoken to us by the gospel which we have read and which have been preached to
us. The word is eternal. There is no question of what they are, what
manuscripts are genuine, who wrote them, or what Bible version is authentic.
Psalm 119:89 LAMED. For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled
in heaven.
God’s word was preserved for us by the Holy Spirit.
Psalm 12:6 The words of the LORD are pure words: as
silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. 7 Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt
preserve them from this generation for ever.
It is not important that we are not sure what the original
autographs said because of the Holy Spirit working through faithful Christians;
copyists and translators, to produce what God wanted us to have in our
language.
Jeremiah 36:27 Then the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah,
after that the king had burned the roll, and the words which Baruch wrote at
the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, 28 Take
thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the
first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned. 29 And
thou shalt say to Jehoiakim king of Judah, Thus saith the LORD; Thou hast
burned this roll, saying, Why hast thou written therein, saying, The king of
Babylon shall certainly come and destroy this land, and shall cause to cease
from thence man and beast? 30 Therefore
thus saith the LORD of Jehoiakim king of Judah; He shall have none to sit upon
the throne of David: and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the
heat, and in the night to the frost. 31
And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their iniquity;
and I will bring upon them, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and upon the
men of Judah, all the evil that I have pronounced against them; but they
hearkened not. 32 Then took Jeremiah
another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote
therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim
king of Judah had burned in the fire: and
there were added besides unto them many like words.
If you remove the Holy Spirit from the preservation of God’s
word you have no Bible, just an old book of questionable origin and
authenticity. It is impossible to understand the history of Bible translation
without faith in what God has said.
2Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God,
and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness: 17 That the man of God may be perfect, throughly
furnished unto all good works.
Job 32:8 But there is a spirit in man: and the
inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.
In the late 16th and 17th centuries a
new way of thinking came about for Western civilization. Historians call it The Enlightenment. Through it the
intelligentsia began to think in terms of God, not as the cause of all things,
but as only the First Cause, if there
was a God at all and all things just didn’t happen by random chance or the
self-organizing properties of the material world. Man began to see smaller and
smaller entities in existence and then he got down to the point where he could
not see anything but the effects of invisible things, not the things
themselves. So, he postulated and imagined and fantasized about what the things
he couldn’t see were composed of. He created abstract, mathematical models to
explain his theories and his own arguments began to be about the model and not
about the reality. Once he continued in this direction he stopped questioning
his basic assumptions, that all things
came about by random, natural processes without any God in the picture. Man’s
reasoning ability became his god and there was nothing greater.
Christians, too, began to absorb this view. It didn’t matter
what manuscripts or Bibles Christians had used for over a thousand years. What
mattered was breaking it down into component pieces, manuscripts, the effects
of a process we could not see. They took the Holy Spirit out of the process.
The Bible was created then by men. They imagined these men as affected only by
their own intellect, their own faith, their own reasoning, and they graded
these manuscripts on reliability and authenticity as required by their own
minds. God was honored as a First Cause
only, in the creation of the original autographs. The same God who could answer
their prayers could not preserve His words. They were lost for 1300 years and
found again by men named Westcott and Hort and given to a world that did not
have God’s word until they arrived on the scene. Man’s reasoning ability became
his god and there was nothing greater.
The Bible I am quoting was the last Bible, the last major
Bible version, translated before this era, by committees of dozens of the
finest minds of their time, the most devout, the most accomplished, praying for
light, not to be deceived or to deceive others, in their humility. God’s word
is settled. All antagonisms or arguments against it are mere opinion.
Authoritative Catholic Bibles like the Challoner
Douay-Rheims and the Jewish Bibles in America until 1917 were profoundly influenced by it, adopting its
phrasing in places. Words and phrases commonly used in English came from it
like making a difference from Jude,
verse 22, and the skin of my teeth from
Job 19:20. It shed light on Western civilization ushering in the greatest
missionary effort, the greatest scientific advancements, the greatest voyages
of exploration and discovery, and became the Common Version for the first colony of a great power to throw off
the yoke of its master and begin a new country founded on freedom of conscience.
Its importance was so profound that even scholar, historian, and modern version
translator, Philip Schaff, admitted that most of the Protestant world
considered it to be inspired by God.
And now, we have chaos, confusion, and you will be hard
pressed to meet even one modern Christian who believes in the modern versions
who has read the Bible through even once when non-Christian philosophers in the
1600’s complained that even boys and girls believed the Bible literally and
thought God spoke to them through it, and Bible reading until now was a common
thread throughout Christian history. Paul said to Timothy and the Lord might
say to us;
1Timothy 4:13 Till I come, give attendance to reading, to
exhortation, to doctrine.
God’s word endures forever. Do you have it?
No comments:
Post a Comment