Sunday Sermons
Imperishable Seed
“For you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God” (1 Peter 1:23).
In the above verse the word of God is described as being imperishable seed. The term imperishable means, “not subject to decay or corruption”. Added to this, the word of God is also described as being living and enduring. Both of these words are in the present tense, reminding us that the word of God is something that remains, lasts, persists, and continues to live. The word of God that is declared to be imperishable is the message that had converted these people, that is the gospel message (1:25),which includes the writings of the apostles, or what we today call the New Testament and the Scriptures (3:2; 3:15-16). In contrast to this claim, some today argue that the Bible we possess contains many errors, is missing books, has been corrupted over the centuries, and therefore is unreliable and cannot be used as a standard of absolute truth. Such attacks come from both religious and nonreligious quarters. Atheists and humanists attack the credibility of the Bible, but so do liberal religious scholars such as the Jesus Seminar. Mormonism claims that a great and abominable church had “taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious” (1 Nephi 13:26). In fact it could be rightly said that, “there is no other book that more people have tried to destroy than this one” (You Can Trust Your Bible, Neale Pryor, p. 15).
The Corruption Assumption
The first thing that needs to be said is that there is absolutely no proof that the Bible has been tampered with and corrupted over the centuries. Consider the following observations on this point:
· There is a definite problem with the issue of credibility when fallible and mistake prone men seek to attack the infallibility of God’s word, when men with agendas, preconceived ideas, and axes to grind, seek to attack the objective truth (John 17:17), when sinners (Romans 3:23) try to convince us that the message of a holy God is tainted (Psalm 19:8).
· What is gained in claiming that the Bible has been corrupted? If the Bible has been corrupted then man is not some how suddenly free from God’s jurisdiction, rather man finds himself condemned without any hope of salvation, for a corrupted Bible would be another gospel (Galatians 1:6-9), and it would be a false witness as well (1 Corinthians 15:15). Faith in a corrupted message is worthless, and would mean that everyone is still in their sins and without hope of salvation because without an uncorrupted Bible no genuine message of salvation exists.
· Such an accusation is a definite attack upon the wisdom and power of God. “It seems to be no small reflection on the wisdom of the Divine Being, to say that He first influenced the writing of a set of books and afterwards permitted them by chance, or the negligence of men, to be irrecoverably lost. If they were not serviceable to instruct and direct mankind in the methods of attaining the great ends of being, why were they at first given?” (Introduction of the Scriptures, Thomas Horne, Volume 1, p. 56). See 2 Timothy 3:16-17; Romans 1:16; Hosea 4:6/
The Motivation Behind the Accusation
Theories simply do not pop into existence; rather certain preconceived ideas or prejudices move people to accuse the Bible of being a corrupted document. Due to reasons rooted in selfishness, some do not want God to exist at all; others want to believe in a Supreme Being who never speaks to man, which is an unreasonable and foolish idea. Still others operate on the assumption that a Supreme Being would never give us a book of rules, an absolute standard of truth, and a book that “preaches” to us (Ephesians 5:5; 1 Corinthians 10:12-13). If God is selfish, if God could care less about mankind, or if God has no morals, then the Bible is not His word. Yet the Bible, as it presently exists, is exactly what one would expect, if the God who rules this universe is righteous, holy, compassionate, just, and merciful.
The Primary Audience
Those who claim that truths have been removed from the Bible and errors have crept in, forget that the books of the Bible were not written centuries after the events described within them took place. Rather, the audience that witnessed the events is also the audience that read about the same events! For example, the generation that experienced the events in Exodus through Deuteronomy actually had Exodus through Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 31:24-26; 31:22, 31:30; 32:1). We see the same thing in the lifetime of Joshua (Joshua 24:25-26). Before Joshua dies there was a complete record of the events that took place during his lifetime that was added to the law of God that already existed (Joshua 1:8). Thus, there isn’t any time for myths, legends or corruptions to enter the Biblical text. It did not take centuries for people to figure out what the Biblical books were, rather, the writings of Moses were accepted as God’s word in his day (Exodus 24:3; Joshua 1:8). If fact, Daniel, a contemporary of Jeremiah, accepts Jeremiah’s writings as Scripture (Daniel 9:2), and Peter accepts Paul’s writings as Scripture as well (2 Peter 3:15-16). There is no long gap of time between when the events in Exodus through Joshua actually happened and when they were written down, which means these recorded events could not be viewed as mythical or merely stories handed down from a distant past (since legends take many generations to develop), rather they were current events. Many of the people that would read the book of Joshua, had lived through the actual events that were recorded in the book. The same is true for those who would be the first to read or hear what was in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy,Deut. 4:10 “remember the day”. Therefore the events in these books would have to pass the test of being accepted by the very people who had lived at the time these events were taking place. The eyewitnesses to the events recorded in Exodus through Joshua, accepted as accurate the description of those events. Should that not tell us something? The same is true in the New Testament. When Paul writes about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the various eyewitnesses who saw Jesus after He was raised, Paul reminds the readers that many of these people are still alive (1 Corinthians 15:6), and thus could verify the truthfulness of what he was writing. Within twenty years after the resurrection we have congregations formed in the principle cities of the Roman Empire, and in these churches the books of the New Testament were being read (Colossians 4:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:27; 1 Timothy 4:13). These books were not locked up, but rather were exposed to public investigation.
Jesus and the Scriptures
· Matthew 5:17-18 “not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law”:
When Jesus spoke, the oldest section of the Old Testament was almost 1500 years old. Jesus is commenting upon the Law and Prophets, as they existed in written form. Here is Jesus’ assessment of the Old Testament text that existed in His day. It was inspired right down to the smallest letter or mark of punctuation. In fact, Jesus would make an argument based on the tense of one single word in an Old Testament verse (Matthew 22:31-32). The term stroke denotes the stroke of a pen, by which some letters were distinguished from others. Wow! What a different view Jesus had of the authority and inspiration of the Old Testament in contrast to modern religious leaders who claim that it is filled with errors, myth, and that the text has been corrupted at various places. “You will find so many people today who seem to think they can believe on the Lord Jesus Christ fully, and yet more or less reject the Old Testament” (Jones p. 187). Be impressed that there is nothing in the biblical textsmaller than the above. If the smallest letter or stroke of the biblical text was authoritative and inspired, then everything else must be as well. If the smallest letter is the Word of God, then the entire book or collection of books must be as well.
· Matthew 24:35 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away”
Jesus is not talking about the audible sounds that He made when He gave the above sermon, for those sounds did pass away. He is talking about the actual sermon He gave that would be recorded, as His other teachings for all time (John 14:26; 2 Peter 3:2). If the Bible has been corrupted, then the above promise is false.
· John 5:46-47; 10:35; Matthew 22:31:
Jesus often either exhorted His audience to read the Scriptures or He made arguments based on what God had said in the Old Testament. Such reasoning proves that Jesus considered Scripture to be an infallible and incorruptible guide, the final court of appeal, and thus the absolute truth on the matter. None of these passages would make any sense, and this reasoning and these exhortations would be completely meaningless if Scripture cannot be trusted for its accuracy.
The Bible and the Catholic Church
A popular myth that has circulated for some time is that the Catholic Church removed books and doctrines from the Bible. This argument is rooted in complete ignorance of the facts. The Old Testament was complete and was accepted by the Jews as a complete collection centuries before the Catholic Church ever existed. The books of the New Testament were accepted and known by Christians even before the first century closes and long before the arrival of the Catholic Church (2 Peter 3:16). There are also lists of New Testament books, thousands of manuscripts of New Testament books and complete New Testaments that date prior to the formation of the Catholic Church as well. In the Fourth Century A.D., when the Council of Carthage issued the list of twenty-seven New Testament books, it did not decree which books Christians had to accept, rather, it simply listed the books that Christians had already been accepting for centuries. No one had to tell first century Christians that Paul’s letters were Scripture!
“To whom shall we go?”
“Before one turns his back on the Bible, he had better ask where he is going to look. He should not give up something unless he has something better to turn to. If one discards the Bible, where will he turn? Where would anyone find a book with teachings that surpass those of the Bible? Where could the equal to the Golden Rule or the Sermon on the Mount ever be found?” (Pryor pp. 18-19). (John 6:68)
