Right. So like I said, we are going to
be over the next what over this term, we are going to be going
through some of the questions that people have sent in.
And today I I'm going to be going through a question which I
loved that came in and at some of these, just just to note some
of these questions, we are we are going to answer everyone's
question who sent a question in. But some of them they may not be
worded exactly how you wrote them because a few people asked
the same kind of question. So they've just been kind of
rephrased into an encompass all question.
And today, to kick off our series, our very first question
is, can we trust the Bible? Which I think is really, really
key because as, as a church, we've just gone through our
foundations, our, our, our values.
And we've looked at that through the, the lens of a lifeboat.
And our very first value is that we are about, we have a church
that is built upon the truth that we find in scripture.
I mean, this is this is our value statement from our
website. It says we are building a church
rooted in the unchanging truth of Jesus Christ and his word.
This truth rescues us from death, frees us from the power
of sin, and transforms us daily. It is the foundation on which we
stand, the message we proclaim, and the hope we offer to our
community and the world's. Now that sounds great.
I think it does anyway. But it means absolutely nothing
if, if This is why I've got a few Bibles with you, by the way,
I just went around last night and grabbed a few.
This is why, This is why this is so key, Because if we can't
trust this, we can't trust what we've got in our hands or on our
phones, then what are we building upon?
We've got nothing to build upon. We have to be able to trust what
we've got, what the Bible. And so there's so many good
questions that come in on, do we, can we trust the Bible?
Questions like how did we actually get the Bible?
I mean, did how did, how did we get this, this leather bound
thing that many of us might have at home?
How, how was, how do we know that it's just not made-up?
How do we, how do we actually know that what we have written
down in here is the same As for example, the Apostle Paul wrote
2000 years ago? How do we know?
Because there's, you know, if those of you, you know who, who
listen to Muslim apologetics, one of their first thing to go
to is the Bible you've got is not the same.
Muhammad knew what the Bible was, but you don't.
But how do we, how do we and we, you know, we instantly might go,
well, that's rubbish. But how do we know that that's
rubbish? Did some of you may have heard
this? No.
Did the there was a council, and we'll talk about in a second if
you've never heard of it, but there was a council of church
leaders and Emperor Constantine in the year 325 at Nicaea.
And some of you have been, some of you have listened to The
History Channel and on History Channel, they've told you they
are at that council. There was a tonne of there was a
tonne of gospels, a load of literature that could have been
in the Bible. But then they chose the ones
that that made it, that made Jesus seem how we we see him.
They kind of dismissed loads and they chose others.
That's not true either. But how do we know that's not
true? Now?
How, how are we meant to read it?
How are we meant to understand it?
Well, let's get into it. So very simply, the Bible, the
Bible, the word we have for Bible, it comes from the Latin
word tabiblia. And for those of you who grew up
in Latin speaking languages, Romance languages and Romania,
Italy, Spain, France, you all know that Bibliotheque or that's
kind of that, that that sort of word, it means library, it means
the books. And that's because this is not
just one book, it is a collection of 66 books that were
written over a period of 1600 years, by over 3 / 3 different
continents, by over 40 different authors, in three different
languages. And the amazing thing is that
even though it it's 66 books, 1600 years, three different
continents, over 40 authors, 3 languages, it wonderfully tells
a cohesive story of God, of Yahweh's pursuit of rebellious
humanity. So how did we get this Bible?
How did we get the Bible? How, how did it, how did it
form? Well, if you open up your
Bibles, you will notice that a massive, the biggest proportion
of it is, is that's about the next one, that one that's Old
Testament and that's New Testament and the biggest.
So let's start with the, with the Old Testament.
So how did we get the Old Testament?
Well, the Old Testament is what we would call the Hebrew Bible.
It's the, the Hebrews, they would call it the the Jewish
people, they'd call it the Tanakh, which is an acronym for
Torah, Neveim and Ketuveim. And here we go.
Here's those 44, sorry, three books that make up the, the
Torah and the books from our Old Testament, how they fit into
those 3 categories. And the beautiful thing of this.
And now you might notice if you know your contents page of your
Old Testament, you'll notice that it's in a slightly
different order. It goes Torah, no Genesis,
Deuteronomy, then it goes prophets, Joshua down to the
minor prophets. And then it goes the ketamine
Psalms down to Chronicles. And that's a slightly different
order that you will have on your contents page in your, in your
Bibles. And the reason for that is
because the Jewish write the Jewish writers, the Jewish
scholars, when they were putting the, the Torah together, when
they were collecting these, these scrolls together, they
were putting them to an, in an order.
They, they thought about the order that they wanted to put
them in. We get this, we get, we get this
with the Psalms. I don't know if anyone's ever
noticed this in the in the Psalms, but the Psalms is
made-up of five books and but they're not in chronological
order. They're not like this Psalm was
written 1st and then Psalm 150 was written last.
That's not how it works. You'll get this.
You get, I can't remember what number it is, but you get part
way through it and at the end of a certain Psalm that goes thus
end the Psalms of David. A few Psalms later it goes a
Psalm of David because it's not in order.
It's not doesn't it's not meant to be chronological order.
The Psalms are written so that Psalm 3, it is meant to help you
read Psalm 4 and Psalm 4 helps you read Psalm 5 and so on.
And this is how they writ, how they ordered the scrolls so that
you, you, you, they build on one another and they tell this
amazing story of how God in the beginning, he chose a people,
how he, he, he decided, he chose Adam and Eve.
And he said that he wanted to through them fill his glory into
the entire world, but they failed.
So we started with Noah and he fails.
And then he grabs Abraham and Sarah.
And it becomes very clear very quickly, as you read on through
the scrolls that people aren't able to fulfil this amazing
mission that God has given them. And it as we get through, as we,
as we get to the end of the prophets, we start to see, oh,
it's not going to be us actually, we need a leader, we
need a king, we need a saviour. We need someone who can come and
make everything right, who can unite the world, who can bring
God's glory to the entire world. So then we read through the
Ketabine and we get to Chronicles.
And you read the, you read Chronicles and you realise the
world needs a king, the world needs a saviour.
But he never came. He didn't come.
It's an unfinished story. We get to the end.
It's an unfinished story. The the, the, the Messiah hasn't
come. And what's worse is this is his
chosen people, the Kingdom of Israel.
They are scattered to the four corners of the world.
There are useless bunch who are nowhere.
And God said, God said it was through them.
He was going to bring his chosen one, but but they're scattered.
They're in exile, but there is a little bit of hope.
The last few lines of Chronicle tell us that King Cyrus of, of
Persia, he, he puts this edict out to say the Jewish people
who've been in captivity in Babylon can go home and that in
it ends. Then 400 years pass and this
Jewish preacher, rabbi from from Nazareth starts going around
saying things like this. In Matthew 5, he says, do not
think that I have come to abolish the law and the
prophets. That's the, the make up of all,
all the Torah. Don't think I've come to abolish
it. I've not come to abolish them.
I have come to fulfil them. The Torah, that's the Torah, the
Tanakh, it, it is unfinished. 400 years later, Jesus comes on
the scene and says I have come to complete it.
I've come to bring an ending to it.
And we, we read, we read, we have the gospels that make up
our New Testament. The gospels are details,
detailed accounts of of eyewitnesses who saw what Jesus
did, how he was bringing about a completion to the Torah.
We read read the book of Acts, which is a historical account of
what the first believers did in response to how Jesus taught
lived, died, was rose again. And then we have the the letters
that we we call them epistles, which tell which explain to us
how we are to live in light of the truth of Jesus Christ.
And now, like I said, some have tried to say that these, these
books that we have in the Bible, these books we have in the New
Testament, especially that they are, they're a hand picked bunch
of, of books that that there were many, many others.
And at Nicaea in 325 people, just the, the goes there, they
picked the ones that made Jesus sound like how we want him to
sound. And they disregarded a load of
others. And like I said, that is
complete rubbish. It's not true.
And the reason why it's not true is because the books that we
have in our New Testament today, as soon as they were written,
the other churches recognise them as Scripture.
We read this in two Peter. So Peter the the guy who was in
the inner circle, the guy who Jesus told to lead his church
that he writes this. He says bear in mind that the
Lord's patience means salvation. Just as other our other brother
dear Paul, he's talking about the apostle Paul who wrote loads
of those letters in our New Testament wrote wrote with you
with wisdom that God gave him. He's saying that he's saying
that the writings that Paul has written the Ephesians,
Colossians, Philippians and so on, they are inspired by God.
He writes in the same way in all his letters, speaking to their
speaking in them. Of these matters.
His letters contain some things that are hard to understand,
which ignorant and unstable people distort as they do other
scriptures. So Peter, living at the same
time, has Paul. What this shows is that Paul's
letter to the Ephesians, for example, it didn't just go to
the Ephesians church, it made its way around.
It was copied and sent to all the churches of the 1st century
and Peter gets hold of these letters and he says these are
just the same. He, Peter puts them on the same
level as Isaiah, as Jeremiah, as Genesis, as Exodus.
He says these are scripture you see, and that was not the case
for others. See there were other books.
By the time you got to Nicaea 325 you got you.
There were other books. There was the the Gospel of
Thomas, the Gospel of of Judas and the Gospel of Mary to name
name some. But unlike the biblical books
that we have in our Bible now, and here's the list of our New
Testament. A The church never recognised
them as Scripture from the beginning.
B All these books, if you can see that where you are, I'm
going to send it my slides out for everyone.
But you see there all of the books that we have in our New
Testament were written within the 1st 1st century.
The the very the very latest that are the the most critical
people believe some of our letters were written in our New
Testament was was 1995 AD. The books that other people from
The History Channel, whatever are trying to say should be in
our Bible as well who were disowned like Thomas or
whatever. They weren't written for another
hundred 200 years. They were not eyewitness
accounts. See for the early church to
include letters scripture in our New Testament, they had to meet
three criteria. First written during the
Apostolic age, that's the 1st century.
So they are either written by an apostle or they were written by
a friend of an apostle like Luke or, or an apostle approved it.
So it was during their lifetime. Obviously, these fake gospels
weren't. They did not contradict #2 they
did not contradict the Hebrew Bible, which many of these fake
gospels do. And thirdly, they were widely
accepted by the entire church, which some of the which many of
these fake ones or all these fake ones weren't so a nice
seer. Unlike what The History Channel
might tell you, they didn't go, we're not having them, we're
having them. What they just did was these are
the ones we've had for for 200 years.
These are our scriptures. They just affirmed what everyone
already knew. So that's how we got our New
Testament. And if you open up any, any
Bible that you many of you've got at home, these are the books
you will have in it, the books of the Tanakh for our Old
Testament. And these are the books of our
New Testament. But some of you who grew up
Catholic, who grew up going to Catholic Church, anyone.
Yeah, I know there's a few others who maybe aren't here
today, but yeah, who grew up Orthodox yet.
Now you may know this and other others in here may not know
this, but if you grew up Catholic or you grew up
Orthodox, there are more books in your Bible.
There are more books than we have there.
See, we have, we have 27 books in our New Testament and 39
books in our Old Testament. But if you grew up Orthodox or
you grew up Catholic, there's a few more.
There's a few more. So why and how and why don't we
in our Protestant Bibles have them as well?
Well, for the last 2000 years, the whole unified Church has
recognised that the 27 books of the New Testament that are in
every one of our Bibles and the 39 books of the Old Testament
that every one of us has in our Bibles, which Jewish people will
have in their Tanakh are inspired by the Holy Spirit.
They are from gods. But like I said, if you're
Catholic, Orthodox, you have a few more.
And to explain why we have to go back to the, to the 1st and 2nd
century BC. This is a, this is a example.
See for in our Protestant Bibles, we have 39 books in our
Old Testament. In a Catholic Bible, there's
this 39, but then a few more, which they call the Dutro Canon.
And then if you're Orthodox, well, they have another section,
which I can't pronounce that word, but I'll let you, you try,
try and read it. It's, it's, it's Greek and it
means the writings, the things we read.
And you see that they have even more books.
And the way that we explain, we explain that is we have to go
back to the the 2nd and 1st century BC before Christ.
You see, our Bibles end, Malachi, or if you're, if you've
got a Jewish Bible, they end with Chronicles.
But after the Jewish people, they return, they're let go by
Persia. The world soon turns Greek.
Anyone heard of Alexander the Great?
He conquered within his lifetime pretty much the whole of Europe
and Asia, and during his time he everyone then therefore spoke
Greek like English today. Greek was the world language.
Everyone spoke Greek. And so because the Jews, because
they so treasured their scriptures and they wanted
people to be able to read their scriptures, they wanted
everyone, they wanted every town to have a synagogue where the
scriptures were read. But they knew that a lot of the
world didn't speak Hebrew anymore.
They only spoke Greek. So a group of 70 scholars,
Jewish scholars got together and they started translating the,
the, the Tanakh and also some other important books to them
into Greek. And they collected these, these
writings together and they called them the Septuagint.
And what they did is they, they not only added the Tanakh, they
also added other books. Like up there we've got Tobit,
Judith, we've got a bit more, it says there's Book of Esther, but
they add a bit to it. There's, there's Wisdom of
Solomon and Syriac in Baruch and Maccabees.
They, they, they bring these in and now these were really
important pieces of writing for them, but they were never
classed as Scripture. What they wanted was they wanted
their fellow Jews who spoke Greek to know their history, to
know about them. They wanted to give them a
greater wealth of writings than just the holy inspired
Scriptures. And actually when Fast forward a
few 100 years to a guy named Jerome, he was commissioned by
the Western Church to translate all the scriptures into Latin
because when he was around the Western world, the European
world, everyone spoke Latin. So he was commissioned by the
church to translate the scriptures into Latin.
And he had he got hold of a Septuagint and he started
translating from Greek into Latin.
But because he was a smart guy, he, he was reading through some
of these things. And as he's translating, I mean,
it took him 20-3 years, by the way.
I mean a long, long time. I mean, he didn't have Google,
he didn't have AI. He had nothing like that.
It was just him and a Greek and Hebrew dictionary just going
through word by word, translating it into, into Latin.
And, and as he was going through it, he reckoned he he realised
that some of the writings that he was translating.
Were only a couple of 100 years old that were from the 1st and
2nd century. He, he realised that when he was
translating Genesis, for example, that that was that was
that he, he could take 1000 years from that and and it was
and he also, he knew that it was trans, it was from Hebrew.
But then he got these other books like Baruch or Syriac and
he was like, oh, the writing style.
I can tell this was never written in Hebrew.
This was actually always written in Greek and it is only a couple
of 100 years old. And So what he did is he, he
took the Tanakh and he translated that into Latin.
But the other books he wasn't comfortable about translating
because he was told to translate the Bible and he didn't really
want to translate the others, but the church had told him, we
want you to translate everything.
So he did. But what he did is he translated
the Tanakh, he translated the old, the New Testament letters,
and then he translated the other books that he had a tobit down
to Two Maccabees. And he put them in a different
section, a different section called the apocrypha, which
means hidden or secret things because he didn't really know
what they were about, but he was told to translate them.
So as a dutiful Christian, a loyal to the Pope, that's what
he did. And actually it wasn't until the
16th century that the word Apocrypha got replaced by
Jutrecannon because the Catholic Church at the after the
Reformation, the Catholic Church saw the Apocrypha and they
decided actually there are some doctrines that you find in the,
in the Apocrypha, in the Juto cannon that aren't anywhere
else. See, the Catholic Church, by
this time, they've made a lot of money off of charging people to
pray for people who are dead to do indulgences and things like
that. And that's not anywhere in
scripture, but you can allude to it in some of the books like
Maccabees that that might be there.
So they decided, OK, these are really important now and people
are starting to question Scripture.
So therefore we're moving these from Apocrypha from Hidden from
Secret Things to Dutra Canon, which just means the second
Canon. The, the we're saying these are
scripture, the Orthodox Church. Now the reason why they have
even more is because the Septuagint, it wasn't a leather
bound book. It was a collection of scrolls
held together and it was written in the East.
And what happened is the, the further W you went, some of the
less important ones just got lost.
And so they, they just, they lost to some along the way.
So by the time Jerome gets hold of a Septuagint, he's just got
less to work with. But the Greeks and the Orthodox,
they have far more and. But what's really important is,
is that in the Orthodox Church, whilst these are in their Bible,
they are not considered scripture.
They are just considered. They're called the books we read
because they're good. They see them as good books for
us to read, for us to know. But the they are not Scripture.
They will look at them and look at it with interest.
But if, if for example, Ezra contradicts something in Baruch,
well, they'll take what Ezra says and they'll, they'll, they
downgrade the others. So they're not Scripture.
And then in the 1500s in the Protestant Revolution, Martin
Luther, John Calvin, Stingley, they built the Reformation upon
Scripture being everything script.
We live by Scripture and scripture alone.
So therefore what they did is they went back to the Hebrew
Bible and they said, well, these other books in red, they're not
in the Hebrew Bible. So, so we don't confuse people,
we're going to get rid of them. We're going to get rid of them.
We're not going to have them because only Scripture we base
our word, our work on. So should we read them these
books in red, these these second ones?
I think so. I think they're great.
They're brilliant. If you if you want an idea of
how the how the Jewish believers in Jesus time, how they, how
they got their, their, their doctrine and how they believed
about angels and demons and stuff.
I mean, the book of Tobit is a brilliant book about, about
demons, about about angels. It's it's a great book.
You know, I was reading the other day.
I was reading the the first book of it's not up there, but the
first book of, of Enoch. And in the first section, it's
called the book of the watchers. And there's just an amazing bit
of writing, just of worship, describing the ancient of days,
the king of glory and how what the Messiah will be like when he
comes. And it was just like, this is
wonderful. This is just like like reading
some of our songs by Phil Wickermore, who whoever you
know, it's brilliant. So yeah, I think we should read
them, but they are not Scripture.
They're useful, but they're not Scripture.
So that's how we've got our Bible.
That's why we've not got some some books in it that if you had
a Catholic Bible or whatever they've got in it.
But how do we know that it's the same?
How do we know if we open up this, and we have just opened up
here to Two Corinthians, how do I know what I read here?
If I was able to transport back in time and give this to Paul,
how do I know if he was able to speak English?
He'd go, yeah, yeah, that's what I wrote.
Yeah. Yeah, I wrote that.
How do I know that? Actually, scholars are 100%
certain that it is correct. Why?
Because they have the original writing that Paul made.
No, they don't. They've been lost, but they are
100% certain that what we have in our Bible is the same as what
Paul and the other writers wrote due to something called textual
criticism. Now I just want to explain that
to you. OK, Say I haven't got my phone
on me, but I want everyone in here to have a piece of a piece
of writing from me. I want a page.
I'm going to write a page. And I want everyone to have
that. Not only do I want everyone here
to have that, but I want everyone who's part of our
church, who's not here today, who's on holiday sunning
themselves or whatever. I want them.
I want them to have it as well. And I can't go.
I can't type it out and push send.
All right, so I'm going to write one out because I don't really
like writing, but I'm going to write one out.
And I'm going to give one to Andrea.
And then Andrea's going to copy two more, and she's going to
give one to Katie, who's going to go and give one to Josiah.
And then they are going to copy what they've just been given.
And they're going to copy so that everyone in their rows got
it. Then they're going to pass it on
behind everyone in their row until we get to the back.
And then those in the back are going to copy out again so that
those who aren't here can have one.
Now we all, we all leave. And unfortunately, the, the,
the, the writing I gave to Andrea gets lost.
We don't know where it's gone. How on earth can we tell what I
wrote? Now, what's even more
complicated is that as as everyone's copying out now
Amanda, she gets her copy and she's asked to make a copy.
And as she's writing out, she misses a comma and passes out
onto someone. So someone has got a copy
without a comma in it. Pete gets completely distracted
and misses out on an entire line.
So if you get one that Pete copied, you're missing a line.
Lizzie gets 1. And Lizzie looks at what I've
written and she thinks he's not explained that very well.
So she she adds a bit in. She adds another line in that
says that it just doesn't change it.
She just writes a bit in to explain.
This is what Ben meant. You weren't here.
Ben meant this. OK.
And that gets passed on. How on earth are we going to
know with the original gone, what was I wrote?
Well, let's pretend that 100 surviving copies are left.
Of those 100 surviving copies you grab, gather them all
together. Two of them are missing some
punctuation, which makes it a bit difficult to read.
Four of them don't seem to have a line in it that others have
in, and four more have a bit extra in it which others don't
have. How on earth are you going to
tell what I actually wrote? You gather them all together and
this is what they do. They gather them all together
and they're able to say, OK, those went that way.
And there's there's a bit missing on some of them.
There's a bit extra on some of them.
But actually the whole bit with the big volume of 100, it
creates a system of cheques and balances where you're able to
see this is what we know was originally written.
Now we don't just have 100 copies of the first range back
to the first couple of centuries.
In fact, we have 5800 Greek copies that date back to 25 to
50 years after they were originally written, counting all
and remember, some of these were translated into Greek, some were
put into to Syriacs, some were into into Coptics, some into
Latin. With all of them for the 1st 250
years, we have 24,000 copies. That is how they know.
That is how they know that it is accurate, that it is correct.
And see, look, the earliest, the earliest copy piece of it's a
piece of John is, is dated carbon dated to the year 125,
just just a few years after the writer of John was was meant to
have written it. I mean, look, look at that.
We've got Homer's Iliad. We are, we are certain that what
Homer wrote we have now, but we only have 2000 copies of that or
just under. And it, the earliest copy we
have was almost was 500 years after he wrote it.
I mean, Julius Caesar's wars we've got, we, we believe that
what we have is right, but the time gap between the earliest
copy is 1000 years and we only have 250 of them in total.
That is how amazing the Bible stacks up compared to other
historical evidence. And you know what?
Even though the evidence is overwhelming that what we have
in our Bibles is exactly what was written down 2000 years ago,
our Bible scholars, those who go to the original text and
translate them into English so that we can read it, are so
concerned that we can trust what we are reading that they do
things like this. I don't know if anyone's ever
seen this. Let's read it.
I never usually put the verse numbers up there, but you'll see
why it's in. In John chapter 5 it says
sometime later Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish
festivals. Now they're in Jerusalem near
the sheep gate there there was a pool which in Aramaic is called
Besada. This is verse 2 and which is
some which is surrounded by 5 covered colonnades.
Verse 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie the
blind, the lame, the paralysed verse 4 there is no verse 4.
Now this what they this then it has a footnote in your Bibles
and it will say some manuscripts include the story of the Angel
coming down, dipping its wings in in the water and and the
first one in gets healed. Now when the reason why it's
there is because when when not Tolkien the wrong person.
When when Tyndale of different T Tolkien did not write write
interpreted the Bible. When Tyndale interpreted the the
first Bible into English, the manuscripts that he was copying
from that he was translating from had verse 4.
Then, especially in the 20th century, there was a massive
discovery of loads of different scrolls dating back thousands of
years, and they found in them there wasn't.
Everything else was exactly the same, but verse 4 wasn't there.
So what they believe has happened is they've had a Lizzy,
they've had someone who has read it and gone.
Well, no one knows. I know why people used to gather
round the sheep gate, but no one else does.
So I'm just going to add in this was because this is what they
believed and then they did it. It didn't change the meaning or
anything, but because our Bible scholars want us to be 100%
confident that what we have is true, they put it as a footnote.
So we know, so we can say that should give it not give us less
confidence. That should give us more
confidence that everything that we read is true.
You see, we, we, we, we have to, we have to look.
We've looked at the creation of the Bible.
We've looked at how why we have the Old Testament, how it is,
how we have the New Testament, how it is, why we've not got
other books. We've also looked at the extent
that scholars today go to to make sure that we can have
absolute confidence. So when you're Muslim or your JW
or your Mormon friends says your Bible's not accurate, you can
say no, no, it is, it is, it is 100% accurate.
But what's the takeaway? What's the big point of looking
at this? Well, actually the big point of
looking at this is we need to read it.
If we can trust it, there's no point going, yeah, I can trust
that. But never look at it like Andrew
was saying, Katie was saying, there's no point.
It's point saying God wants to hear our prayers and we don't
pray. We are cooled to read this
Bible. I mean, it's amazing.
It's amazing. Everywhere the church spreads.
When the church spread in the early centuries across the known
world, everywhere it went, schools popped up.
People learn to write. I mean, we take it as a, as a,
as an integral right that, that we all should be able to learn
to, to read and write and have an education.
That's not the case across the entire world.
There are many people across the world who've never learned to
read and write. Actually, there's languages
across the world that don't even have a written language.
And that's because the church as it expanded was so intentional
and making sure we could read, we could write.
It is not an integral right that we could should all have been
educated, but the church made it a right because it wanted every
single person to be able to read a Bible.
It wanted every single person to be able to understand, to have
one in their hand and read it. That's why whereas Satan was so
against as languages moved on the Bible being translated into
English, Tyndale, he fought and he fought and he fought to get
the Bible translated into English.
But but the, the we, we the God desires for us to be able to
read it in our own language. That's why trusts like the, the
charities like the Witcliffe Trust, their mission is to
translate the Bible into every language on planet earth so that
everyone can have a Bible that they can read.
Now that sounds hard enough, but there are, there are amazing
videos on, on YouTube that you can watch where some places they
go, the people can't read and write to start with.
Now, how do you translate a Bible into a, into a nation's
written language when they don't even have a written language to
start with? So they, they do more.
They go to these places, they spend time with them.
They they, they start putting their sounds, their words into,
into letters and teaching them how to read their own language
so that that they can write a Bible in that language.
They are so determined to it because because God desires us
to have it, that we can read it, that we can have it and and
there are there are to come back up.
There are so many Bibles that we can have.
I just went round last night and grabbed a few from from our
house and there are so many. I mean, this is I actually
forgot my preaching Bible after all of that.
I mean, this is so heavy. That's why I keep putting it
down. But you know, there's so many,
you know, this is this is this is one of Jen's devotional
Bibles. This is a I've got a youth Bible
here. I've got a, a, a, a, a study
Bible. That is the what is this one?
This is new American standard. This was my first a study Bible,
a an NIV and and this is a, a chronological Bible in the in a
new King James. And we have so many Bibles.
We have so many Bibles. They all say the same thing, but
wonderfully what they do is we have a plethora of of different
ways that they are interpreted. We have word for word.
So this is, this is, this is my, this is my new American
standard. This is word for word.
It means that this is really accurate.
But for those of you who speak more than one language, you know
that it is grammatically, it is impossible to translate one
language into another because we speak in different orders.
We put things differently in a sentence.
But this one tries to do that. And so you read it out loud,
it's horrible. It's horrible to read out loud,
but it's really actually, if you want to know exactly what was
said, you, you, you, this is my go to.
But there are others like the The Message Bible, which are the
complete opposite to that. They are phrase for phrase.
So most Bibles that you were open, they'll say verse one,
verse 2, verse 3, verse 4, The Message Bible will go, here's
verses 1 to 10. And it's basically what it's
doing. It's not, it's not changing the
Scriptures. It's just going, this is what
verse one to 10 says. And we're going to, rather than
doing it word for word, we're just going to tell you what that
is. And so it's less word for word,
but it is still accurate. And they have different,
different uses the, the NESB or the the King James Bible.
You might use that for Bible study for word studies.
The the message or the new Living translation, they're
brilliant. I know that Andrew's read The
Message sometimes on a Sunday because it gives us a different
perspective. It says the same thing but just
in a different way and it kind of can hit home better.
Personally, on a Sunday, I always tend to read the NIV
because it's kind of that middle of the roads on and at home.
I I will read also the the ESP, the English standard version.
Which one should you read? Which one should you read?
Read the one that you'll read. Jen, give me your Bible.
This is Jen's Bible. OK, Now it says big letters on
the front, ESV. But it doesn't matter what what
interpretation it is what you can see.
Well, the first thing that strikes you is it's a well read
Bible. Yeah, it's got, it's got got
duct tape all the way down the side holding it together.
And that's it's Bible. I mean, I like a beautiful
looking Bible. I like a black leather, you
know, leather and gold leaf and all that stuff.
But that doesn't matter if it's just going on your bookshelf to
look at. God didn't providentially keep
his word and have thousands of people translate it so it could
get to your door so that you just went, oh, that looks
lovely. I just like looking at that.
No, no, no, he got it said you grab hold of it and you read it.
And So what if a page tears? So watch of it.
It doesn't. If the the gold leaf rubs off or
it doesn't look quite as nice anymore.
That's not what it's for. It's for us to read and get into
US. See, every time, every time we
open up the pages of this book, we're we're submitting ourselves
to God and we're saying, God speak to me.
God speak to me through your words.
Every time we read it, we're allowing God to speak to us.
And like Paul said, sometimes you'll read it and you'll be
like, I don't know what that was talking about.
That was hard work. Sometimes you'll read it and
it'll send you to sleep. Let's be honest.
And sometimes you'll read it and God will speak to you.
You know, I, I, I, I don't know if you do, but I do a, I've got
a Bible plan which I go through. I've currently got one at the
moment, which is, which is really slow pace.
It's, it's the Bible in three years.
None of this Bible in a year nonsense.
Because I find that sometimes you end up reading 6 chapters
and you have no idea what you just read because you're just
going to plough through it because you've got 15 minutes
and you need to get through it as quickly as possible to make
sure you've ticked as you've done today.
But I've got this, this Bible in three years.
It's just just one chapter or a bit of a chapter every single
day. And do you know what?
Sometimes, like I said, I don't hear anything, but sometimes God
speaks to me. And let me encourage you, if you
pick up the Bible and you read it and you're like, I didn't get
anything out of that, read it for a year, every single day.
And I promise you God will speak to you.
And you may say, but what if he only speaks to me once once in a
year? Hearing from God because you
read his words is worth it. Isn't that worth it?
Now? I expect it to be a lot more,
but what I'm saying is the weight, the value of God's word
of him speaking to us is worth only hearing for it once.
Think of Abraham, what was it he heard from God?
And then was it Like, I can't remember off the top of my head
now, but it was a long time until God spoke to him again.
It was decades until God spoke to him again, but he lived off
that first encounter church. We have the privilege of not
going years of not going week to week when someone can read us
scripture, but she every single day of reading his words and
letting God speak to us. So let's do that.
Let's be a people of his words. I'm going to pray, I'm going to
pray and then I'll let then we can go home.
But Lord Jesus, I I want to thank you for your Bible.
Lord Jesus, I thank you that providentially over the last
several thousand years, you have kept your word for us.
Lord Jesus, I want to thank you for the thousands of people who
have copied, who have, who have, who have, who have given
themselves to copying your words to, to translating your word so
that we can have it in English, so that we don't need to learn a
foreign language to be able to understand it.
Lord Jesus, I want to thank you for those who lived and those
who died so that we could have access to your word.
Lord Jesus, I want to thank you that it is easy.
We can go to a bookshop, we can go to Amazon right now and we
can order a, a, a whole number of Bibles.
Lord Jesus, I, I thank you for that privilege, Lord Jesus, but
I pray that we obey a people who persevere in your word, Lord
God, who read it, who get it into us, who aren't discouraged
when we, when we find a bit that's boring or we've, we've
read it 4 times already and we fell asleep every single Time,
Lord Jesus. But Lord God, you would, you
would give us the, the ability to, to stick in there, Lord God.
And as we do that, we would hear from you as, as, as Peter, as,
as Paul says to Timothy, that your word is useful.
It's useful for correction, Lord Jesus, it is useful for drawing
us closer to you. It's useful to, for showing us
how you desire us to live. So, Lord God, make us a people
of your Word. Amen.