Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction:

Well it was on a warm day in June of 1992 that I entered the Pulpit for the first time at Emmanuel Baptist Church, not really knowing what the Lord had planned for me.

I came with an intense desire to preach the Word of God seriously, yet joyfully.

And although I have grown in my intense desire for that and in my understanding of the Scripture; there is one thing that I always believed.

There was one great foundational principle that I believed, I believed it then and I believe it now, that when I held a Bible in my hand, I actually held THE Word of the Living God.

I have always believed that.

But I do not need to tell you that this is the living Word of God, you know it is.

There is no other explanation, it is so obviously divine.

My task is to tell you what the Bible means.

Before I can do that, I have to have the Bible.

And before I can say this is the Word of God, and you can see that it is the Word of God, it has to be the Word of God.

What you hold in your hand, right now, I can tell you is an accurate, English translation of the original manuscripts written by the authors of the Bible.

You have an accurate English translation of texts that originated thousands of years ago.

That is one of the most important things that you learn in Seminary.

Because if you have any wavering in your confidence about the integrity of the Bible, it will stuck the conviction right out of your heart.

Because if the Bible can be shown to be inaccurate then you have no assurance of anything.

So the basic question that anyone who gives their life to study of the Bible is, is it accurate.

Now, I will confess to you that I am not limited to the English.

I went to college and minored in Greek so that I could be familiar with the language in which the Bible was written.

And I can tell you this, that I started out believing the Bible was the Word of God and I ended believing the Bible was the Word of God even more strongly.

Not because I have studied the science of the manuscripts throughout the years, but because I have studied the Bible and it is it’s own best defense.

You hold in your hand the Bible and you don’t even think about the fact that there is along history behind it of careful preservation of the original text, so that thousands of years later when you read the Bible, you can know that it is accurate.

All translations of the Bible, all of them, are based on ancient sources.

They have been compared by the most fastidious, dutiful, thoughtful, careful scholars through the centuries so that I can say to you, unequivocally, the Bible you hold in your hand, if you have formal equivalency, an actual translation, I can assure you, you have an accurate … an accurate Bible

The printing press didn’t show up till around 1500.

Everything up to that time was copied by hand.

Scribes understood the seriousness of what they did.

There are some amazing stories about scribes, listen to this, copying down the Hebrew Old Testament who wrote one letter, left, and took a bath.

Came back, wrote another letter, left, and took a bath, and did that until they had written the whole Old Testament.

We have, and let’s just take the NT because that is where we have been working, 25,000 manuscripts ancient manuscripts of the NT that are extant, that now exist.

That is an abundance of manuscripts by which we can compare them all and to an understanding of what we need.

Nothing in ancient literature even comes close to the mass of documentation that we have for the NT.

There are, as I said over 25,000 ancient manuscripts and there are over 5700 Greek manuscripts and they go way back.

We have manuscripts from the second century and the third century; our Lord lived in the first century.

There is a manuscript call p-52, and they are numbered by the order in which they are found, and it is the Gospel of John and it dates from 100 to 150, and John lived in the 90’s.

Somebody copied an original, most like, or a copy of an original, very near the original.

There is another papyrus, they were writing on papyrus so they’re called papyri, there’s another one called the Bodmer Papyri in which we find John and Luke and it dates from 175 to 225.

And then there’s the very famous papyrus called the Chester Beatty papyrus that has all four gospels and the book of Acts and it dates around 200.

They go way back.

Here’s the amazing part.

There probably shouldn’t be a lot of manuscripts from those early years.

Why?

Because second century in particular and the third century, for sure, was a time of immense Christian persecution, and an effort to stamp out Christianity by the destruction of Christians and Christian scriptures.

But the Lord preserved these ancient texts, copies of those very close to the original.

Once you get into the fourth century, around 325, or so, you get Constantine making Christianity legal.

The persecution ends and now manuscripts proliferate.

They’re everywhere.

And so by the time you pass say 325, the Council of Nicea, we begin to see manuscripts in abundance.

The two most important ones, one is called, it’s a Codex, this is called a Codex because it is a bound volume, rather than a scroll.

The first one that is very important is called Sinaiticus and it’s about 350 and it’s the whole New Testament.

The second important one is called Vaticanus, 325 and it’s the whole Bible.

You have 8,000 ancient manuscripts of the NT in Latin, called Vulgate.

And the Vulgate dates from 382 to 405.

We also have 350-plus copies of the Bible in Syriac that goes back to the 200’s.

We have all these ancient manuscripts that when compare, say the same thing.

If you take the quotes of the early Church Fathers, before 325, there are among those fathers 32,000 quotes from the NT.

We could construct the entire NT by just the quotes by the Church Fathers.

Now, let me give you something to compare that.

The Second most common ancient document in the manuscript world is Homers Iliad.

Next to the New Testament there are more copies of Homer’s Iliad than any other ancient piece of literature.

Oh, by the way, there are 643 of them … 643, small change compared to twenty-five thousand.

And, oh by the way, the oldest one is from the thirteenth century A.D. and Homer wrote in the eighth century B.C. We don’t have anything even close to when Homer wrote.

Who knows whether Homer ever said any of that?

Another familiar piece of literature to a student of history is the Golic Wars, Caesar fought Golic Wars.

He wrote the Golic Wars, the history of the Golic Wars in the first century B.C.

There are ten existing manuscripts of that, the oldest one is a thousand years after Caesar wrote.

Some of you may have heard of Herodotus, the Greek historian.

He wrote history.

In fact, Herodotus could be the father of historians, he was the son of the first historian.

He wrote in the fifth century before Christ.

We have eight manuscripts of Herodotus’ history and the earliest is 1300 years after he wrote.

One of the scholars that I’ve studied in years past, is a man named A.T. Robertson.

You’ll see his name connected to matters regarding biblical scholarship.

A.T. Robertson says, “The vast array of manuscripts has enabled textual scholars to accurately reconstruct the original text with … listen to this … more than 99.9 percent accuracy.”

That’s pretty good.

More than 99.9 percent accuracy.

Now you say, “You mean, in all of that there are no errors?”

Oh, I didn’t say that.

They made errors.

They put in a wrong word, put in a wrong spelling, left something out, occasionally they even tried to clarify something, some of these scribes.

But guess what, we have so many manuscripts, we know when they’re doing that.

We know when we’re doing that.

Plus, if something shows up in a later manuscript, and it’s not in any of the earlier ones, we know it was added later.

It isn’t brain surgery.

You say, “Well, why in the world are you telling us this?”

Because there is a place in verse 14, where that could be questioned by those who do not love God’s Word as we do.

And as we approach the last verses of the Book of Revelation, God makes his final invitation and four reasons that should cause them to respond to it.

I.

The Invitation (vs.

17)

There are two very distinct addresses that are going on this is verse.

The first address is a prayer to Christ to come.

And the second is an address to the sinner.

In this verse the Spirit, the third member of the Trinity, responds to the imminent return to of Christ by saying “come”.

The next does not specifically say why the Spirit desires the return of Jesus Christ, but I believe that there is a positive and a negative reason why.

Negatively, throughout the history of humanity men and women have constantly denied and rejected the work and the power of Jesus Christ.

They have assaulted the work of the Holy Spirit, as is seen in the discourse that Jesus had with the Pharisees in , and the ministry of the Holy Spirit is to point people to Jesus Christ.

Speaking about the wicked world prior to the flood God said:

The stiff-necked, rebellious Israel constantly provoked the Spirit during their forty year wondering in the wilderness.

Something that they would continue to do throughout their history.

The sinful world’s blasphemous rejection of Jesus Christ will reach its apex during the Tribulation.