Understanding your Bible

Our theme for 2024 has been “Possessing the Land”

Each summer I take requests for the sermons that you want to hear.

However this summer I also decided to preach a summer mini-series on “The Lord’s Prayer”

Last week we wrapped up that series with the line “Yours is the Kingdom, the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

To be true to the text, I had to tell you that the last line of the Lord’s prayer is not in all of your Bibles.

It was likely added when the Bible was being compiled into one book around the fourth century.

But then it raises the question - Why is anyone adding to the Bible?

If you go to college these days, you will probably come across a professor or two who will tell you that the Bible is unreliable - that it is full of errors and that it is really outdated and irrelevant.

When you go into a book store and look at all the different Bibles and translations, you can be overwhelmed - which one should I read?

Which translation is right? They can’t all be right, can they?

We know that the Bible is a holy book - it’s God’s Word.

Does that mean that God sent an angel with golden tablets with the words of scripture on them? - No, that was the book of Mormon.

Well, surely and angel dictated the words to a prophet and scribes wrote them down as the prophet was speaking his visions? - Actually, that would be the Koran.

Well maybe if there was just one translation of the Bible and all the people who teach it or study it have to follow approved interpretations from a central organization- That describes the Watchtower Society - the Jehovah's witnesses do that.

Do you see how every attempt to try to centralize, control or otherwise make God’s Word say what we want it to say only results in error?

The Bible isn’t like any other religious book.

It came about by an amazing process that was both human and divine.

It has never been able to be contained by the religious institutions of man.

Just like the Kingdom of God - it’s organic -

not perfect in a sterile sort of way -

but perfect in that God knew the end from the beginning.

Yes, there are many different ways of reading and studying the Bible.

But the more we study and the more we reflect on each other’s interpretations through different perspectives - the more truth we learn about God.

I want to answer some very practical questions about the Bible:

How did we get the Bible?

How do we know it is reliable?

Which translation should we read?

Through answering these questions, I hope that you learn something about God - who though he gives us an objective way to know Him, is also constantly exceeding our understanding.

How did we get the Bible?

The Bible did not drop out of heaven, it was written by people, many different people.

It was written by over forty different authors over a period of 1500 years.

It is not surprising that you will find some seeming contradictions.

What is surprising is that there are so few of them!

And they are easily resolved when you consider different human perspectives.

When you read the different books of the Bible there is evidence of one Divine Author working through many human vessels.

The scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit.

2 Timothy 3:16 ESV

16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,

Inspired literally means “God-breathed”

Do you know what else is God-breathed? We are!

Our very life and existence is described in Genesis as having been breathed into us by God.

The Bible is a living document - you can study it for a lifetime and you will always learn something new.

It’s not flat.

It’s not just words on a page with only one possible meaning.

It is nuanced, multivalent - meaning that there is more than one way to read and understand it.

There is imagery in the Bible with layers of meaning.

And God likes to use wordplay and even humor.

Many of the New Testament writers quote old testament passages because they see the words differently in light of Jesus’ life and fulfillment of those passages.

2 Peter 1:19–21 ESV

19 And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, 20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Peter is essentially saying that the writers of the Old Testament didn’t entirely know the full meaning of impact of what they were writing because the Holy Spirit was leading them to write things that would have application for future events and fulfillment.

Inspiration has the word “spirit” right in it.

Spirit is both breath, wind and the unseen life force of God.

The Evidence Bible: Irrefutable Evidence for the Thinking Mind, Notes Chapter 1

1:21 The idea conveyed is that just as the wind controls the sails of a boat, so also the breath of God controlled the writers of the Bible. The end result was exactly what God intended. Josh McDowell

So when we read the words of scripture, we should expect the Spirit to speak through them.

The books of the Bible were chosen through a process.

How about the books of the Bible? Aren’t there other books written around the same time that aren’t in our Bible?

Yes. That is true.

There are other books that are useful for historical context and background, but they are not inspired in the same way as the books that are in the Bible.

Some of them used to be the Bible as a separate section - the Apocrypha.

The Reformers, like Luther, had them taken out when the Bible was published in the common language because he didn’t want people to think that they were part of the canon.

The Canon of Scripture is a term we use to describe the books that have been accepted as both authentic and authoritative revelation.

Canon is not a cannon. - It means a measuring stick.

It is the standard by which we measure every other divine revelation.

The books of the Apocrypha are likely authentic, but not authoritative.

There are other books - the Psuedopigrapha which are likely not authentic.

If you see something on TV or the internet that speaks about “ancient texts that tell the secret history of the world” - those are likely pseudopigrapha.

Especially during the days of the early church, people were writing fake gospels, claiming to have secret knowledge from the Apostles, but they have never been accepted as reliable or authentic.

The text of the scripture was miraculously preserved.

How do we know that what is in the Bible is what is supposed to be there?

The last chapter of the last book of the Bible contains a warning against adding or removing from the scripture.

Revelation 22:18–19 ESV

18 I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, 19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

The people who copied the scripture took their job very seriously,

First of all, they did it all by hand, writing with ink on animal skins (vellum) or on paper (papyri) made from papyrus reeds.

When they finished a page they would count all the rows and characters- it all had to match exactly.

It was said that if you pushed a pin through a stack of manuscripts- a good scribe could tell you every letter that the pin would intersect.

If they found an error in a manuscript, they had to destroy it and start all over.

So how did things get added to the Bible?

First you should know that most of the discrepancies in manuscripts involve the names of people and places.

Scribes would make notations in the margins as to the current names of people and places in the text for the purpose of clarity, eventually, some of these “notations” found their way into the main text.

The other so called “changes” are also clarifying post script commentaries with pieces of oral tradition that eventually made their way into the text - such as this line in the Lord’s prayer or the last part of the last chapter of the gospel of Mark - or the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.

When the Bible was translated into English, it was translated from the Latin Bible and from a single Greek manuscript - by that time, these passages had been part of the text for hundreds of years and were presumed to be original.

When we talk about the authority of scripture, you may hear terms like “infallible” or “inerrant”.

The doctrine of infallibility and inerrency applies to the original manuscripts.

One problem with that - we don’t have original manuscripts.

We have copies of copies - but we have thousands of them!

By studying the copies and knowing where they came from - we can pretty thoroughly reconstruct what was likely in the original manuscripts.

This textual study has accelerated in recent years with the ability to do computer searches, digital copies of the manuscripts and scholars can share information with each other.

The the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1948,

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain thousands of fragments of manuscripts, many of them hundreds of years older than our oldest manuscripts.

Scholars who doubted the accuracy of the manuscripts found that the older manuscripts actually proved the authenticity of our scriptures rather than disproving them.

How do we know it is reliable?

Rather that using the words “infallible or inerrant” I prefer to use the word reliable to describe the scriptures.

Those terms can be misleading because they refer to the original manuscripts, not the text that we have in front of us.

An intellectually honest scholar has to admit that there have been some changes in the text along the way, but that by reconstructing the original manuscripts we can see that what are likely changes are reasonable and intended for greater clarity - like with the Lord’s prayer.

Words like infallible and inerrant convey the idea that the Bible has this sort of mystical perfection - like the holy books of other religions.

Our Bible is perfect, but it is perfected through a process, just like God’s redemption of humanity.

It is the Word of God through human vessels.

The writer of the Bible were not perfect people.

Moses and Paul were murderers.

Matthew was a collaborator with Rome.

Luke was a Gentile.

David was an adulterer.

Solomon was a womanizer.

Hosea married a prostitute.

Ezekiel was just weird!

I could go on… but the point is that God uses imperfect vessels.

If God uses imperfect people and yet He is able to convey His Holy Message through them, then isn’t it reasonable to believe that He has been watching over the scriptures to keep them pure and holy as well?

The Old Testament scriptures were compiled during Judah’s exile in Babylon.

We know that God used Daniel, a righteous Jew, to serve in the Kings court and to witness to the truth of God in the middle of what was otherwise a wicked kingdom.

Another key figure in Babylon was Ezra the scribe.

Ezra was not only instrumental in the rebuilding of the temple, but he lead a whole group of scribes who copied and complied the scriptures.

One thing Babylon was know for was it’s vast libraries.

Ezra was trained by the best scholars in the world and he used that knowledge to give us the Old Testament.

Another outcome of the exile was that since Jews could not worship in the temple with animal sacrifice, many of the Jews gave themselves to the study of the scripture instead.

It was in this context that they began to form synagogues, where they would gather for prayer and reading from the Torah.

Do you see how God turns an imperfect situation into the perfect solution?

The Word of God is true.

The words inerrant an infallible imply that there can never be any mistakes in the scripture.

Well, that may be true for the original manuscripts, but we will probably never know for sure.

There are, however, examples of clear scribal errors in some of the manuscripts - and we know this because there are so many manuscripts that we can actually track the differences.

Like I said, most of the so called errors, were manuscript notations for clarity that found their way into the text.

I had one professor who said, “The Bible is so inspired that even the errors are inspired!”

Face it, most readers would rather not omit the last line of the Lord’s prayer.

Aside from our ideas of grandiose perfection - we can say with confidence that the Bible is true.

The things that the Bible said happened - actually happened!

If you follow the study of Biblical archeology, they are constantly finding inscriptions verifying the identities of David, Solomon, Jerusalem and Israel.

We have geological evidence of a world-wide flood.

There is more evidence to support the existence of Jesus Christ than almost any other historical figure.

What is most amazing is that the more scholars pour over the text of the Bible, the more we learn about its truth.

The Bible is still the best-selling book of all time.

In 1995, the Guinness book of world records estimates the distribution at over 5 Billion copies.

In 2021 the estimate had increased to as many as 7 Billion.

It is also the most-sold book in the past 50 years - by far!

The Bible doesn’t make the New York Time Best-seller list because it is in a category all by itself.

No other book has been dissected and studied as much as the Bible.

If you want to become a biblical scholar you need to first choose if you will focus on the Old- Testament or New Testament.

That determines if you will concentrate your studies on Hebrew or Greek.

Most scholars spend many years on a single book or subject -there is that much material out there to be reviewed.

And as much as the Bible has been criticized, there are still plenty to good people defending it - arguably the best scholars.

Those who spend their careers defending the Bible are still around after a decade or so - the others seem to disappear after a few years.

It is God’s self-revelation.

The most important thing about the Bible is not what is says about history or science (although I would argue that when studied in context, the Bible has much to teach about those subjects as well).

The Bible’s main purpose is to teach us about God.

John 20:31 ESV

31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

God inspired the writers to write in a way that we would know about Him.

There is a common theme that runs from Genesis to Revelation.

It is the story of redemption.

The first two chapters of Genesis show a perfectly created world.

And the last two chapters of Revelation depict the world in its restored state.

The message of the Bible is that God created the word good, and he created humanity to be like Him and to have fellowship with Him.

Mankind was deceived and chose to disobey God - that was the fall.

The Old Testament is stories of God’s dealings with mankind after the fall.

We have stories of people who believed God and walked by faith like Noah and Abraham.

We have stories of God choosing a people and teaching them how to live by His commands, even giving them a land and a kingdom.

The stories of God’s people have their ups and downs, but it is all leading to the expectation of one anointed prophet/king who will redeem God’s people.

Jesus is the central figure in the Bible.

The New Testament is all about him.

Four gospels- stories of his life.

And then the launching of the church - God’s people completing his mission.

And even the books of the Old Testament all point to Jesus.

Everything that has happened since Jesus commissioned the church is also part of the story - but the Bible ends with a church that is being persecuted and longing for His return.

It’s another exile, God’s people waiting to be reborn and the world made new.

When you know the story and you read the Bible, you can see yourself in the story and that story is still being played out.

But most of all, you see how God interacts with people and you can recognize and know how he feels about you.

God loves you very much, and He wants you to turn back to Him so He can have a relationship with you!

Which translation should I read?

So you are a Christian and you want to know God better and you walk into a Christian bookstore and there is a whole row of Bibles:

King James Version, New King James

American Standard Version, English Standard Version, Revised Standard Version, New American Standard Bible from 1995 or 2020?

There is the New Living Translation, Contemporary English Version, The Amplified Bible, the Passion Translation and a popular translation just a called The Message.

Oh, I am just getting started… which one should you read?

Read all of them!

I’m not kidding. They are all faithful translations of the Bible.

How can they all be right?

How many of you speak more than one language?

When you learn another language, you don’t just learn another way of saying the same things - you learn different ways of thinking.

The Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek with a few passages in Aramaic.

Greek and Hebrew words can have more than one meaning.

Many passages of scripture have multiple viable translations.

And there are also differences depending on which manuscripts are used and how they are prioritized.

And the choices that translator make have to do with how they perceive the context of the word usage -

Translators are basing their choices on what they believe is the main point of the author?

All of that to say that there may be multiple ways to read or translate the same verse and there is often more than one valid translation.

However, some translations are better than others.

The best translation for you to read depends on your reading level and your goal for reading the scriptures.

Translations range on a scale from word for word (literal translations) to thought for thought (dynamic equivalent) or common language versions (paraphrases).

There are advantages to each way of translating that you might choose depending on how you want to read the Bible.

Word for word translations are better for study.

Bible study is a discipline that every believer should do to some degree, but some people will do it often - they probably want a word for word translation.

Matthew 4:4 ESV

4 But he answered, “It is written, “ ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”

Good Bible study has some steps to it.

What did it mean to the people to whom it was originally written? (Historical/contextual reading)

What is the plain meaning of the text? (Exegesis)

What does it mean for us today? (Application)

If you are going to study the Bible at this level (and you don’t know original languages) a word for word translation will give you the best insight into the original author’s exact words and context.

You can even use an interlinear Bible or program to see what Hebrew or Greek word was used and how it is used elsewhere.

If you are going to be preaching or teaching in a way that hangs a lot of meaning on the wording of scripture, it is important to use a more literal translation.

When I was in Bible School, most churches were using the KJV, because that has been around for a long time.

In the 1980’s with the improvement of scholarship and communication, new English translations were coming out almost every year.

I used the NASB, because at the time it was the best word for word translation available.

In seminary I began using the ESV, because it is a word for word translation, but it also pays closer attention to repetition, poetic patterns and word play in the scriptures.

Not everyone can attend Bible School or Seminary, but a study Bible will have notes in the margin or at the bottom which will help you to navigate a more difficult translation.

A paraphrase is helpful for getting a fresh perspective.

I think the most important thing in selecting a Bible translation is finding one that you can read and understand at your own reading and education level.

Literal translations don’t read the way we normally talk and think.

It can make your head hurt and then you no longer want to read it!

The best Bible for a person is whatever Bible they will actually read!

Psalm 119:11 ESV

11 I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.

A person is not going to study the Bible until they read it.

One way for people to study the Bible is to read it in different translations to get a sense of the different possible meanings of a passage.

Long before I knew any Greek or Hebrew, I learned to look at different translations and compare them to find a range of possible meanings.

Now that I do know a bit about biblical languages, sometimes I find that a paraphrase actually captures the meaning of a word better than a more formal translation, because the translator has a little more freedom of expression.

When I travel in other countries and preach through interpreters, I can’t preach messages that are based on a narrow interpretation of scripture.

I can’t hang a whole sermon or a whole doctrine on a single word choice in the English text - it may not translate well.

They are going to look at their Bibles and say, “I don’t get it!”

The more you try to be clever when preaching through an interpreter, the more people just look back at you with blank stares.

Something that I like to do, and Karie as well, because we have both read the Bible over and over many times - read it in a new translation!

Some times we “tune out” things that have become too familiar.

In our heads, we think we know what it says, so we kinda just skip over it.

A new translation, especially a paraphrase, can make the scriptures fresh and new to us again.

You will read a verse and be like, “what, wait, does it really say that?”

Then you go back and check your word for word translation to see how the translator is understanding the context.

The whole purpose of having a Bible in your own language is to read it.

Find a Bible that you understand.

You can go online or use a Bible app to try out different translation.

Read it, study it, apply it to your life.