Can I trust the Bible I have to be God’s word?
Everyone, welcome to the cultivate podcast through the Grove church. I'm Charlie
Lofton, the lead pastor there, and I'm here with my friend and partner, Mark
Freeman. Hey, yo, what's up, dude? It's all good, man. I've
enjoyed this series that we've been doing, doing last couple of episodes. I
hope you have been enjoying it. We've been kind of
answering, kind of wrestling through some questions about the
authority. Where does authority come from? It's kind of where we started. Where does authority
come from and where does truth come from? Ultimate comes
from God revealed in Jesus, revealed through his word.
And that is what we believe, that truth is found in
God's word. And then we spent some time, last time just kind of building on
that a little bit, just kind of talking about what the Bible says about itself,
about does it claim to have this sort of authority.
And really, I think we ended up spending some fairly impromptu time, it feels
like to me just kind of talking about what is it like to even
wrestle with that idea of me
wanting to have authority versus really yielding authority to
God through his word and
ultimately kind of coming to the conclusion still that we really believe
that God's word is
true and that's where truth is. So we need to be really
careful about how we interpret it because that is
the Christian's ultimate source for truth about the world, about
God, about ourselves. So I want to be faithful to
submit to that authority, and I would be faithful to be a diligent student of
the scriptures, not with an arrogance that says, I've got everything figured out
always, but constantly learning to understand
what God's word really says and what it means when it says it.
And so we've been kind of back and forth and on that for a
couple of episodes now. But I feel like we've got one
more really big question left and probably
100 other small ones that would take three years worth of
podcasts to answer. But I feel like we got one more big one. Yeah.
Yeah, I think so, too. Because if you're going to say
that the Bible has that kind of authority, which I kept thinking about this the
last episode, man, I've always loved C. S.
Lewis. His statement, don't, don't
come at me with this. Jesus was just a good teacher
because of the claims he made about himself. He didn't leave us
that option. Right? He is either a crazy man, he's an
absolute liar, or he is Lord. And I had
never thought about that with what the Bible says about itself,
but that it also doesn't leave us any room to just treat it like a
normal book because of what it says about itself. We
have to come to it and decide either it is authoritative or
it's nothing. There's no in between.
No, just, hey, this is just some good ideas, right?
So anyway, I'd never thought about that, but it does. It begs the
question. So we're saying a lot about this,
and we're giving it a really high place in our
life and our church and our decision making and what we do
and the way we see things. So how did the Bible.
I know it's a bunch of books. Everybody like, how do you know
this? And we've decided. You said scripture, but there are a lot
of ancient spiritual texts. Right?
Why this group of books and this group of authors?
Where did that come from? How does that all work?
That is an amazing question. And that is definitely what I feel like the big
question is, which is if we say that scripture
is inspired by God, and this
happens 2000 years ago in the case of Paul and
earlier for the stuff in the Old Testament, and now here
I am, thousands of years later in a completely
different language, reading an english
translation of the Bible. Can I trust
that these are the words that God inspired?
Because the word that we talked about in two, Timothy
316, it says that all scripture is God breathed. It's
sourced by him. And then we talked about that other verse that says that combining
spiritual thoughts and spiritual words and that Paul's talking
about. Even if I just wrote it down, you better make sure you
believe that these words
that were written down by a varying group of authors.
If we believe that those words were sourced by God,
what level of trust can I have
that these words are those words?
And because the doctrine of inspiration, this is
kind of a theological deal. We're kind of talked about inspiring that when we say
inspired by God, we don't mean
I felt something and so I wanted to write it. Not inspired like he's
a cheerleader, but a deeper inspiration as source
and life. And so the pretty
well used definition for what inspiration
means is that essentially that the Bible, again, comes from
God. And if it comes from God, it's completely
trustworthy. We use words like inerrant or infallible,
which can feel overwhelming. But if we can say that if the
words come from God, God doesn't lie. God doesn't make mistakes.
So the words that God said, he said them without
error. And so what
he told the author to write, and again, the definition, obviously is
superintend. He kind of superintended the author to make sure
that what the author wrote would be without error
coming from God. And so
essentially, that idea, inspiration, really
only applies to the original manuscript
that they wrote it on, because inspiration happened at the moment of
authorship. He inspired the process by which
the book was written. So Moses writes it out, Samuel writes it
out. Isaiah writes it out, mark writes it out. Not
you. Different Mark, Paul,
John, Peter. When they wrote it out, they were inspired
by God. That was a God breathed moment. And so it was
true of the words they wrote.
We don't have that. We have something very
different. So the question is, can
I trust what I have? And so, really, this is
kind of how I have historically answered this question.
In order for me to trust God's word,
the Bible that I have, I guess we'll say it that way. I can
100% trust God's word. Can I trust the Bible? I have to
be God's word. There's two things that I have
to believe. One, I have to believe in the doctrine of
inspiration. I have to believe that the Bible is God
breathed and that God is capable,
capable, capable, desiring
and did use a human
person to create something error free.
Humans make mistakes, and so if you're going to use the human author, it's going
to have mistakes. Do I believe that God is capable of using
a sinful, mistake filled person to do something error
free? Can God work
through somebody to write something like that?
And I think the answer to that question is yes, of course he is
capable of doing that. God is capable of working through somebody, that
everything that they say for a given time period is 100%
true. That's what prophets do. I
think I can do it for one sentence.
My birth name is Charles Emmett Lofton.
Sure, I'm a sinful person, but I am capable for a short windows of time
of saying man. I'm calling you Emmett from now on.
I think I prefer Charles. If you're going to go that direction.
I've used Chuck a lot. You can call me C. Emmett Lofton. That's my
lawyer. Uh, where were we?
Oh, yes, sorry. And so if God gets involved, then I'm capable
for a particular period of time, for speaking truth even longer, as long as
God wants to. And so that's the doctrine of inspiration. Do I believe
that God is capable of doing that, and do I believe that
God did that? That's faith. Step one,
faith. Step two is, do I believe
that same God
can and did
superintend oversee the process by which it went
from? Paul wrote it
on a piece of papyrus, sent it to
Galatia, and
2000 years later, what
I have communicates the same thing.
Do I trust that God oversaw that process? So there
really are two significant moments of faith,
and so you can go in and
analyze the process, which I'm more than happy to do.
I've given day long seminars on this topic. I can talk
about this for anywhere from two to 400
minutes, depending on what the situation calls
for. Do you have 400 minutes? 400 minutes. That was a
weirdly specific number. It really was, and I'm trying. It's not divisible by 60,
it's not hours. I did it on purpose because I'm an
idiot.
But really, no matter what I say, whatever
we say about the authorship, and whatever we say about how
the particular books got selected, whatever we say about
the process by which the books were copied, whatever it is we say
about the way the Bible has been translated,
you can always give back the answer. But if humans are
involved, there is the potential and capacity for
sin and error. That is absolutely, 100%
true. There's nothing I can say to convince you that I can show
you without, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the element of human
error has been eliminated because
there has been some human error that has gotten
involved. I wouldn't say that. And even if I
could, I can't prove
it. And so ultimately, before we even get into
the details,
really, both of these things come from a trust
and faith in God. Do I believe God inspired them? And
do I believe that same God that inspired them would protect the word that he
inspired? Does that make sense?
Yeah, I love it because it's just the
reality of faith is one of those things that we want to
get to a place where it doesn't require it. Right? But God has not given
us that. At some point, you're going to hit a place where
you're going to have to go, all right, I trust something I can't
see. Does God want me
to have a trustworthy
translation of his word? Is that what God
wants? And was he willing to do
what had happened, to do what was necessary to make that
happen? It's not just simply
an act. It really, at its core, is a thing of faith. And so then
I go to all these things that I learn, and I'm
blinded, but I'm informed by that
when I read all these things about all the processes that
happen to make this happen, I look at it
through a lens of this seems like what a
trustworthy God would do. So we can take these in any
order I'll let you pick.
When you think about this process, which is the one that kind of hits
you, is it how the books got picked, how they got copied?
Translation, which is the one that's kind of like. That's the one that I kind
of wonder about how they got picked, probably. Yeah. Because
it seems like. And some were picked and some weren't picked. Right.
There were people making those decisions, and it seems like
that's where error could have entered the easiest. Right?
Maybe. So let's think about it
logistically and historically. While the
apostles are alive, all the way up until, I think, John died,
probably around the year 90 AD,
and revelation being the last book that was written, all the way up until
the point that the apostles were alive, scripture was still
being written. And so there was no point, while the apostles
were still alive, that there was a point in which, okay,
we're done, now we're done.
There's no means by which one could say, okay, this is all the
things post Jesus that are Bible
scripture. And so then you write a letter and you send it
to know.
The people in Ephesus and Thessalonica have no idea, but
apparently what's happening is these letters are being copied,
really because of Paul's instruction to do so, you
should copy these and send them on. And so these letters
are being copied and sent to other towns. In other
towns. So Ephesus is getting to read what he said to
Colossi and vice versa, and all these letters are being circulated
amongst each other. And then as
the gospel is expanding beyond just these initial
cities where Paul was preaching, beyond Israel,
into kind of the roman cities kind of
surrounding it, and just kind of expands beyond,
these letters are just being distributed widely.
And so in addition to that, some other versions of the story
of Jesus, or gospels, as we call them, are also going out there. And people
who aren't apostles, like people like Timothy, right,
people who were Peter's disciples, John's disciples, they're
also writing letters to other churches and to each other, and
all they're spreading around. And so there are all these letters and
gospels, some of which we know about, some of which
they're known, but a lot know, most people don't know
about. They're being circulated widely,
and there's no denominations. And regardless
of what the Catholic Church wants us to believe, there really was
not a uniform worldwide
authority structure by which
it was very clear who's in charge. And this is
exactly what we would believe. What would happen would be, from time to time,
situations would come up, they would start challenging whether or not
Jesus. People would start challenging whether or not Jesus was fully God, which was really
never the debate. The biggest debate the church has ever really
had, were mostly around, was Jesus actually a real
person, or was he just God pretending to be? Now,
there was one, a controversy called the aryan controversy, not to be
confused with A-R-Y-A-N Hitler,
A-R-I-N Aryan, a guy named
Arius, kind of more of a predecessor to modern day Jehovah's Witnesses,
who did believe that Jesus was just a human.
And so there would be all of these controversies. And when these
controversies would arise, kind of the leaders in all of these different cities would come
together, and they would have a council. They started to have
these leaders in these cities would gain the title of bishop. And then
eventually, the structure by which the Catholic Church
happened, where there was kind of a bishop of bishops, the bishop of Rome kind
of existed as the bishop of bishops. All of this starts to happen.
And so most of these things were governed
city by city until there kind of became a
growing need to bring an
answer to these things. And so whether or
not which of these letters and gospels and books are the
authoritative ones or not really just wasn't a question
that they necessarily felt like answering. It wasn't like there was this
point at which we've got to figure this out. And really, to be able
to answer that question thoroughly is going to require a
significant amount of time to happen for these things to
fully circulate amongst the world. And so
what happened was that there was a controversy
where a heresy develops. A guy named
Pelagius, he develops this heresy. Pelagius? Yeah, I
know. He's the worst. Not plagiarist. He wasn't
stealing other people's work. Pelagius, anyways.
And he put together what he considered to be a canon,
which was a. I think it was like excerpts from the
Gospel of Mark and some of Paul's letters, and
through a select view of these things, was able to
develop a fairly works centered
approach to Christianity.
And so this was needed to be put down. So
he is spreading out there. This is what we call. This is the New
Testament. And then like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
whoa. So then the bishops and the leaders are like,
we need to put a stop to this. And so there were two
councils, one around 393, called
the Council of Hippo, which is the name of a town,
not a large water mammal. But did
their high school mascot, was it a hippo, though? It would had to have been.
That would be awesome. Maybe just call yourself. Have we missed that? The hippopotamuses.
Do you know any towns? The high schools? That sounds
like a great topic for. When we start a school.
First we have to rename the town. We have to rename the
town Hippo. Wow.
It was around 393 AD, and then the council of Carthage four
years later, 397. And so what they did
was this was. And again, it was built out of a
concern, and the question
was, what are the
authoritative texts? And
their decision making process really came down to three different ideas.
Does it have apostolic authority? Did an
apostle write it, or did someone under the immediate care of
an apostle write it? Not a disciple of
Paul after Paul was dead, but a
companion of Paul. So Paul was kind of with Luke when
he wrote the gospel. Mark was with Peter
when Mark wrote his gospel. Or did an
apostle write it like Matthew, like John, like Paul, like Peter?
And so does it have apostolic authority? Is
it theologically consistent with each other and with the Old
Testament? And does it have
universal appeal and acceptance?
And so the third one, I'll explain this way pretty easily. You can imagine a
book that Paul would write to Galatia where he's like,
tell Fred to cut it out. He's an idiot. He needs to
stop. Jim, sorry for whatever
Fred's doing. Please hang in there. Love, Paul.
I mean, that's really a powerful letter that Fred
really needs to listen to. But it is not universal in its
nature. Right. And then there are going to be some
book letters that were probably written, or gospels that were probably written that the
president, this is good, not great, and probably didn't feel
compelled to copy, or they did. It was just kind of like, hey, this is
kind of interesting. You should probably read this. But if
it's God breathed, you would expect it to have a
certain intangible quality to it
and also a universal nature to it.
Probably the one that is probably most on the fence when it comes to that
is Philemon, which seems to be addressing a very specific issue
with a very specific guy. But the principles in there
about freedom and kindness and treating one another with respect and
dignity are still universal enough. They include it.
Second Timothy is a little bit like that. Right. There's just some of these things,
like maybe galatians even, right? There's some of these that
are kind of like, this is definitely addressing a very specific situation,
but even still, there's a universal appeal to it. There's a
universal quality to it. So there's an apostle involved. The
theology is consistent, and
there's a universal nature to it. So they're debating all these things, and it
was a debate. There were some things that were involved. I mean, James seems a
little different than some of the other ones. It got debated a lot. Revelation is
just weird. It got know there are some ones
that there was some conversation about it. And
ultimately both of those councils came to the
list of what we would call the New Testament. And it really wasn't until the
second one, the council of Carthage, and they had a follow up a few years
later, that it really just kind of felt like for the first time,
the universal church at the time, the catholic church at the time,
said, these are the books.
And if you want to say
it was about politics and mean between the
established church and these cults and heresies that were
sprouting out. So that's either a good thing or a bad thing. I can't say
no. It had nothing to do with power and
politics. Of course it did, because I don't want cult leaders
and heretics to have power.
And so now we have to trust some people that probably
did rightly have mixed motives,
and we also have to trust a God that superintends it. But to
me, we've got people who are genuinely, both
culturally and time wise, significantly closer to
the timeline than we are,
regardless of mixed motives. Wouldn't their primary
motive be when you're a person and you say that you're a bishop
and you got a whole bunch of them, and our primary mission here
is to figure out which one of these
books are sourced by God. And if
we say it, then what we're saying to the world with confidence is,
this is from God. I don't know these
guys. Two people I
might be worried about three people, maybe, but this number, that level of
accountability. I don't know how you feel when you teach.
I get nervous every time because people are. When I
get up there and talk, they're thinking, this dude's about to tell me what God
thinks. That's
scary. I can only imagine even
again, even if these guys have mixed motives in, there has to
have been a significant fear
of what would happen if people who say they represent God
claim something is from God, but they really don't believe it, but they do it
because they think it gives them some power. I'm just not in on
that. Does that make sense?
And so then there really has not been any real challenge
to that in the over 1600 years. Since then,
there's some famous things like that. Martin Luther said that he didn't particularly care for
the book of James, he's probably not the first
person to say that, and he's certainly not the last person to say that.
People have wondered about revelation. They wondered about it
then, people still wonder about it now. Right. It's
saying it's very normal and natural to feel like one or two books may stick
out from the rest. But there's never really been any significant
challenge to that as the collective works. And so there's some
books that refer to as the apocrypha, which is different than the books that
are in between. In the Old New Testament, there's some other
books
that didn't make it in, but most
of them were just second generation books. They're not
bad books, necessarily. They're just second gen. Right. And it's
like, we're not going to include those. Doesn't make those books
bad anymore. And it is bad if you quote a
Wayne Grudom theology book to somebody or an Andy
Stanley leadership book, doesn't make them bad. They don't
feel like they have that same level of authority and
quality. Any follow up questions? Any of that? I know that was
very speechy. No, but it was very helpful. Yeah.
And so then in addition to that, then there's a process by which these things
are getting copied.
And again, there is an overwhelming
amount of texts,
like old manuscripts, old greek manuscripts of
New Testament letters. An overwhelming number. Overwhelming
even people who are not inclined to
believe the Bible as being inspired by God would say
there is probably more textual evidence. We
probably have a higher level of confidence in
that the texts have been copied authentically, and we have
enough of them to know. Okay, well, this one is a little bit different than
this, but we got so many of them to compare. We got 20 that say
this and one that says this. This is clearly what was meant. This is
just a mistake somebody made. They just skipped over
a word, or they added a word, or a word got
misspelled here. There's so many different copies that there
is just an overwhelmingly high level of confidence
that the manuscripts themselves are the same. And there's some great examples of
this. You ever heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? So there was a time when
the earliest copy of the book of Isaiah that
we had was a few hundred years after Jesus
died. And so then there's certain parts of Isaiah that were
just, like, talking
about that, talk about Jesus. It seemed like
he's talking about him very specific. He's going to be like this. He's going to
be like this. This is going to happen. This is going to happen. And it
was a very common belief all the way up until the moment of the Dead
Sea Scrolls, which is getting in the 19 hundreds.
That somebody had written. They wrote that in, they
wrote that in post Jesus. But then in the discovery
of these Dead Sea Scrolls,
a copy of Isaiah that predates Jesus was found, and it was
found to be almost identical to the book of Isaiah that
we had, and very much had
those Jesus centered passages, word for word, the same.
And there are just a lot of stories like that. You would think at
some point there would be some copy somewhere that would emerge of something that would
make you think, we missed this. You can tell this whole
thing, this is all bad, but there's just a high
level of confidence and there are a couple of stories,
a couple of things that are in your New Testament
that people still have some question marks about the story of the woman
caught in adultery without sin. Cast the first stone,
the great commission at the end of Mark where it says, hey, you're going to
see different. Drink poison and have snakes. People like
question whether or not that was a late ad and not part of the
original. But if you take all of those out,
if you take out, hey, he who was out sin, cast the first
stone, take it out, it doesn't exist.
Do we know less about the character of Jesus? That's just
another story of a pretty consistent character
trait of Jesus. And you take the great
commission out of Mark, it's still in Matthew, still
in Luke, still in acts, which it's still
there. It's still, oh, but the thing
about the snakes, the thing about the snakes is widely
misunderstood. It doesn't say that everyone is going to get bit by a snake. It
says, one of the signs of the power of the gospel will be some people
will get bit by snakes and won't die. Which in fact happened,
like 15 years. Later to Paul in Molten, it was recognized, right?
I mean, it did happen. Doesn't mean it's going to happen to you today. Doesn't
mean you should have snakes in your service, doesn't mean you should drink poison in
your service. Just because it's been misinterpreted doesn't mean it's. But
anyway, you get rid of that, there
isn't anything lost.
And so I believe that, again, even the people
who are the most critical of God's word have a high level
of confidence in it. Again, they would say, hey,
if it's God, we should have 100%
level of confidence. 99.9 isn't good
enough. Well, let's just say, let's imagine a
hypothetical where every copy, every
manuscript of every New Testament book we ever saw
were exactly the same. You know what people would
say then? Conspiracy theory.
Too perfect. It's fake. It's as fake because it's not
possible for this to be true. So in
the realm of realistic, you would expect, if
God is superintending the process, you would expect a
super high level, 99.99% of
accuracy, and you would expect there to be a widespread
number of manuscripts that were preserved. That's what you would expect, and that is what
you have. And the last thing that I think that is
incredibly important. I know this is more speechy than normally we do this.
Some people say, I can't trust my english translation because it's a little bit
like the game of telephone. It was written in Greek,
and then it was translated into Latin, and then it was translated into
German, and then it was translated into English. Well, all
of those things are true, except they're not in a dotted line. It
was translated from Greek to Latin, and it was
translated from Greek to German, but it was not translated
from Latin to German. It was translated from Greek into German. And
all of the english translations we have, every one of them were
translated directly from the greek and hebrew
manuscripts that they had at the time.
Every one of them. There is some debate about whether or not
maybe one book in the King James
was translated from the Latin. There's a latin
version out there called the septuagint, which we're just kind of nerding here for a
little bit that whether or not that was used for some of
the King James. But
these are all direct translations, and they're
all going to be very different from each other because they have different approaches. Some
are going to be highly more literal. Some are going to intentionally use higher
church language. Some of them are going to just be more casual in the way
that they're written. But everybody who undertakes
this, undertakes it with, I want to be faithful to this.
Well, you're saying that nowhere, ever and anytime
anybody's ever inserted their own political ideology
into a translation. I would never say that.
But in the same way that we have a voluminous number
of
manuscripts, we also have
a wide variety of scholarship and scholars
and translations to which one person having an
agenda wouldn't last very long. Right. So
overwhelming. Right. Because there are way too many people looking at it being like,
that's not how that word is translated. And
I believe unintentional errors that have been made in
translation over the years are constantly being
corrected. And so we are
constantly refining the process, constantly getting better and
better greek manuscripts and constantly getting better and
better translations.
But over, above and all of that,
do we trust a God in the process?
So to me, there's plenty of reason to be confident
in the process as it's understood. I think I can trust
this as a reliable representation. But on
top of that and in that is I trust God
wants me to have his word.
Any follow up questions there?
I think if I did, I would send us down another rabbit trail.
Well, I appreciate you at least listening. It wasn't a rant, I don't guessing, but
it's a pretty well not rehearsed.
It's a thing that's deep in me. It's something that really has mattered to
me over the years. I spent a lot of time in
my college years and in the years immediately after that, really studying that
and understanding, because there was a time when it's a pretty big question people were
asking. I think most of the questions people are asking now
really are kind of what we talked
about last time. Can I really trust the authority
that this has when it competes against
what I want to believe or what
we want to believe as a society? I think
that's most of the question. It's really not about whether or not
the divine nature of the transcription process or the translation
of the Latin Vulgate and the Septuagint and all these things. I mean,
those aren't the questions that people have, but I just think it's important
just for people to be able to hear it. And if you do have that
question, you can feel confident. And
honestly, I would be like, if you really do have more questions on this,
I'm available. I'm not trying to talk anybody's ear off
for 400 minutes,
but if you need an extra four or five minutes, I would be glad to
keep talking to you. So please just let me know. You can email me, Charlie,
at the grovechurch.org. We can talk about this all you want, any questions you
have. And Abigail, who's over here running the cameras, I know she's
probably, over the course of the last 2030 minutes, probably has 15
questions. Have you already texted them to me? Oh,
great. She's already texting me some, so that's going to be great. So thanks
for being here. Thanks for joining us. And I really do hope that it says,
strengthened your faith. And to the degree that has had you asking
questions, I hope you'll ask them and you can do that. By again by emailing
me. Or we can just connect on a Sunday. You can find everything you need
to know about us at the grovechurch.org slash Connect. Whether you're local
or away, you can join us in person or stream us online. Connect
with us. We would love to hear from you Mark, again, thanks for being here
and being a part of this. Thank you for being a part of this and
we'll see you soon. Have a blessed day.
