Biblical
Framework
Charles
Clough
Lesson 98
…absolutely taking them over, Christians are
in a small minority today. The
strongest religion in the penitentiary world is Islam, and it’s rapidly growing
because people are looking around for an absolute. Islam caters to the flesh; Christian looks anemic, looks
effeminate to them because of the grace principle. But Islam insists that it has with Mohammed the prophet a brand
new chunk of revelation that corrects the previous revelation. They’re right up front, it’s not continuous,
it corrects the previous
revelation. You never find that in the lineage of the prophets. Nobody’s correcting anybody. They are extending it under the sovereign of
God but they’re not… you don’t find Daniel and Jeremiah saying Moses made
mistakes, now I’ve got to come in, God sent me because I’m going to straighten
out Moses. Where do you find that in
the Scripture? There’s a continuity
there, and that protects us. That tells us what is genuine and what is
counterfeit.
Here’s Daniel, and he faces a problem because
in verses 2-3 he’s looking at the prophecy from Jeremiah, which says there’s
going to be 70 years and then it’s going to be over, the time of desolations. He then says well, what has happened in
Daniel 2? In Daniel 2 what new
information did Daniel get? Daniel got
certain information from God. What
we’re talking about now, here’s one of these apparent conflicts from the Bible,
on the one hand in Daniel 2 we have the four kingdoms. The first kingdom is Babylon, the second
kingdom is Medo-Persia, then Greece, then Rome. Which kingdom is Daniel living in when Daniel 9 is written? He says “the first year of Darius,” of what
descent? Median, so Daniel on this time
line is located right here.
On one hand he’s got prophecy that says
there’s going to be the time of the Gentiles that long; yet he has the prophecy
of Jeremiah that says 70 years are up.
So how can you have the restoration of Israel, because for Israel to be
restored, what has to happen. She has
to be free to reign under the Messiah, and she can’t be trodden under the foot
of the Gentiles. It’s an interesting
problem that comes up here. Daniel is
very sensitive to it; after all, this man was high up in the administration of
both the Babylonian and Medo-Persian kingdoms.
He was equivalent to a foreign policy advisor today. He was very tuned in to the movements of
history so he’s got to deal with this.
It looks like the prophetic utterances of Scripture are wrong. We can well imagine him saying well gee, I’m
reading here in Jeremiah, Lord, that 70 years are up, that ought to be the
point, but on the other hand You’ve spoken through me and You’ve said there’ll
be four kingdoms long. How do we deal
with this?
That’s why he seizes on something that’s
very, very interesting. Notice in
verses 4, 5, 6, and 7, that he does not approach this theoretically. Daniel isn’t abstracting himself from the
prophecy. Often times we will have prophecy conferences, we don’t have those
any more in fundamentalism, we used to.
But often times you get people that were really hip on prophecy
forgetting that knowing about what’s going to happen in the future has to be
applied today. There’s got to be a today application or it’s of no spiritual
benefit to me. So what Daniel does,
instead of taking a fatalistic view, when we get into the doctrinal section
you’ll see how this comes out in his prayer, but he’s not saying what’s going
to happen is going to happen. He’s an
astute enough student of the Jeremiah text, in Jer. 29, to understand that the
kind of thing that’s going to happen in 70,
right here, that can’t happen until it’s preceded by confession.
Why is that?
What principle. Let’s go back to
Old Testament history. There’s the principle.
How did they get in the exile?
What caused the exile to start with?
The sin. What was the
exile? It was discipline because of
sin. If the discipline is going to be
removed, what has to happen? We’ve got
to confess our sin. Daniel recognizes
the principle and immediately in Daniel 9 he applies it. That’s why he has that big long prayer, just
basic elementary theology. He doesn’t
take a fatalistic view, that this 70th year we don’t have to do
anything, it’s just going to happen all by itself; God parachutes it in
somehow. It doesn’t work that way. He
responds and what he’s doing, he’s articulating a prayer that’s very well
designed, heavily designed on the basis of Scripture.
Then in verse 20 the answer comes, and God is
going to expand the revelation. There
are a lot of principles that operate in this.
We’ll take a little excerpt after we get through this restoration and
cover this issue of the millennium, premillennial, postmillennial, etc, because
I want to go over how you interpret prophecy.
The arguments aren’t between the different views. The argument surrounds… what are the ground
rules we’re using to interpret prophecy.
That’s where the debate is. Here
we know that there are 70 literal years.
How do we know that? Because
Jeremiah said so. And we know that
subsequently from 586 BC to 516 BC, that’s the exile. In 516 BC they’re coming back to the land, so we verify. It wasn’t 70 ages, it was 70 years. But the
angel sent from God now begins to interpret the Jeremiah prophecy, and adds
something to it, not in conflict, but to supplement it because the angel is
giving Daniel his answer.
The angel is going to answer Daniel’s
question as to how can this happen in 586 BC, and we know the Roman Empire was
seated at the time of Jesus Christ. The
angel is going to explain to Daniel how it can be that Jeremiah was talking
about 70, yet you have four kingdoms before the Son of Man comes. So the angel says, verse 24, and it
literally reads in the Hebrew, “Seventy sevens have been decreed for your
people and for your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of
sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting
righteousness.” What that literally
says is Daniel, there’s going to be seventy sevens here, for Jeremiah, the
initial condition that verified as seventy years. But the angel says in answer to your question, this is a partial
restoration, because the nation spiritually has not universally confessed their
sin. There’s been no universal
[confession], Daniel’s confessed, maybe pockets here and there. So there’s a
partial restoration based on a partial confession.
The angel says now we’re going to have
seventy sevens. Prophetic scholars
interpret this “seven” as years, or 490 years, five centuries of time. Five centuries of history until, it says,
the transgression is finished to make an end of the sin. Let’s go back to Israel’s history and look
at the end of sin. What does the angel
mean when he says “the end of sin?” He’s referring to the fact that the nation
is in trouble because of their sin. The
exile, the angel says, in other words will continue, partially, for 490 more
years.
Let’s come back to the text, he details
it. But there are details in here,
because obviously Christ hasn’t come in 490 years to end the transgression, to
make an end of sin and to make the city holy.
So let’s look at the fine print.
The fine print says, verse 25, “So you are to know and discern that from
the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem” that’s the Gentiles
given authority to Israel to rebuild, “until Messiah the Prince there will be
seven weeks and sixty-two weeks, “so seven sevens and sixty-two weeks, “built
again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress.”
Verse 26, “Then after the sixty-two sevens,”
so we’ve lost some time here, “after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be
cut off,” this is an eloquent prophecy.
The Messiah is going to come in here, after seven plus sixty-two, after
sixty-nine weeks, or sixty-nine sevens, it says Messiah will come but He will
be cut off. That places him in the
Roman Empire. This prophecy is so
exact. Granted, there are some problems
with chronology because there are three or four problems with what decree and
what year the decree was in, but we’re not off here by a lot. That’s the time period, between the time
Daniel’s heard this and the time the Lord Jesus Christ came on the scene. And it says clearly that the Messiah’s going
to be cut off. The interesting thing is
you would have thought somebody in the New Testament, with all the arguments
that were going around about Jesus Christ, somebody besides Jesus would have
referenced this passage. Here the
Pharisees are, the students of the day, and they never discussed the passage
that talks about the Messiah being cut off.
So Messiah is going to be cut off and have
nothing, so He’s going to basically be rejected by the nation. He’s going to be cut off, He has nothing,
and the people of the “prince who is to come,” there’s a prophecy that’s very
relevant to us today. “The people of
the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary.” Who are those people? The people who invaded Jerusalem in 70 AD,
the Romans. The Bible says those peoples are the peoples of the “prince who is
to come.” “The prince who is to come”
is going to come out of the stock of these people. It says that they “will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood’ even to
the end,” and then you’ll notice, whereas in verse 26 it says “the people of
the prince who is to come will destroy the city,” there the subject of the verb
“to destroy” is the people.
But if you go down to verse 27 a subtle
change happens in the text. Notice now
the subject is no longer a plural but it is a singular, and it says “And he
will make a firm covenant with the many for one seven.” “He,” who is “He?” He is “the prince who is to come,” the great ruler who is to
come, we know him as the antichrist. He
will come, he “will make a firm contract [covenant] with the many for one week,
but in the middle of the week he will put a stop to sacrifice and grain
offering; and on the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate,
even until a complete destruction” this is the false prophet and the antichrist
mixed together here in this passage, explained later in the book of Revelation.
Our point here is not to go into a big
prophecy exposition; our point is that the angel is expanding prophecy at this
point. He’s adding to prophecy, he’s
not contradicting it. He’s explaining
that history is dynamic. This is
something that, it took me a while to get hold of, but it’s something I think
we need to have in our circles so we keep balance. From the standpoint of God history is already in His head. He’s omniscient and He knows everything
that’s going to come to pass. The
problem is we never can get in His head. He’s utterly incomprehensible to us,
and for us to sit here and think that we can draw a diagram of the knowledge
that God has in his head makes us God.
All we have is what He has chosen to reveal,
Deut. 29:29, “the secret things belong to the LORD our God, but
the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever that we may do
them.” What He has in His mind He only
knows. He reveals bits and dabs, but
the interesting thing about history is that He responds to what we do. How He can respond to what we do and keep
history perfectly rational—only God can do that. But there’s a response here.
First of all, go back to Israel’s history.
Remember it was prophesied in Moses day that
this exile would happen. But if you
look at the text that we laboriously went through all last year, what caused
the exile? Was it because God had lightening clouds over Israel and He caused a
big depression and they went into exile?
Not at all. They went into exile
because of their rebellion. It was
their choice, so they freely chose to rebel and yet in freely choosing to rebel
they perfectly fulfilled God’s Word.
The skeptic will look at that and say well then God must have been
pulling strings like a puppet. No, you
can only think of that and I can only think of it as a puppet because in our
finitude the only way we can control something is with strings. Yet He’s in perfect control of history, but
He does it in such a sneaky way, that He doesn’t annihilate human responsibility,
it goes on. We could spend eternity
discussing that question. The point of
the angel to Daniel is that there are very specific things Daniel, history has
a pattern; history has a purpose. It is
not contradiction, it will all work out.
That’s the big message we want to get at.
We want to move to something else,
sovereignty and human responsibility. I
want to take a brief visit to three men who wrote in the closing hours of the
nation Israel. They are the last of the prophets. Open your Bible to the unopened part of your Bible. Go to Haggai. I want to show you a few passages that these three men wrote so
you can see that they are ministering to the group of Jewish people who came
back from the exile. They’re ministering to this restoration group. These people have gone back into the land,
they’ve settled there, they’re rebuilt their homes, they’ve come all the way
back into the land, 516 BC, and they will stay in that land on to 70 AD.
Haggai 1:5, keep in mind this is the
generation that experienced fulfilled prophecy. They experienced the fulfillment of being restored after 70
years; they experienced that prophecy of Jeremiah. You can say, well then they don’t have any responsibility. Oh but they do, notice verse 5. “Now therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts,
‘Consider your ways! [6] You have sown much, but harvest little; you eat, but
there is not enough to be satisfied; you drink, but there is not enough to
become drunk; you put on clothing, but no one is warm enough; and he who earns,
earns wages to put into a purse with holes.”
Doesn’t that sound familiar? [7]
Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘Consider your
ways!’”
What’s the appeal that the Lord is making
through Haggai? Is it to just sit on
their laurels because they have prophecy fulfilled? No, it’s to get on with it.
They have a responsible area of the will of God for their lives. So Haggai addresses the need for human
responsibility, and he does so on through chapter 2. If you look at 2:15, 16, in 17 he’s talking about discipline upon
the nation, “I smote you and every work of your hands with blasting wind,
mildew, and hail; yet you did not come back to me, declares the LORD. [18] Do
consider from this day onward, from the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month;
form the day when the temple of the LORD was founded,
consider: [19] Is the seed still in the barn? Even including the vine, the fig
tree, the pomegranate, and the olive tree, it has not borne fruit. Yet from this day on I will bless you.’’”
Verses 15, 16 and 17 address human
responsibility. But God also wants
people to understand, He wants us to understand because the pressures of life,
when we face them, we need to know that He has the final say. I’ve got to trust that. If I don’t have real confidence right now that
God’s in control, then I can’t be in control, I can’t cope. So I have to have
that assurance, even though I may have a problem that He’s addressing in my
life right now. I’ve got to have that
bigger assurance, and you’ll notice how merciful God is, He’s chewing them out
in verses 15, 16 and 17, but then in verse 21 and 22 is the prophecy that comes
through Haggai, “…I am going to shake the heavens and the earth. [22] And I
will overthrow the thrones of kingdoms and destroy the power of the kingdoms of
the Gentiles; and I will overthrow the chariots and their riders, and the
horses and their riders will go down, every one by the sword of another. [23]
On that day, declares the LORD of hosts, ‘I will take you,
Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, my servant,’ declares the LORD, ‘and I will
make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you,’ declares the LORD of
hosts.” He’s talking to the leaders of
this group.
We can see the same theme in Zechariah which
we don’t have time to do, but keep in mind Zechariah is another guy, he’s the
next fellow in line here.
Turn to the last book of the Old Testament,
Malachi 1:6, again let’s ask a question of the text. Is he giving them a comfort thing here or is he addressing their
responsibility, their human responsibility?
“A son honors his father, and a servant his master. Then if I am a
father, where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is My respect? Says the LORD of hosts to
you, O priests who despise My name. But you say, ‘How have we despised Thy
name? [7] You are presenting defiled food upon My altar. But you say, ‘How have we defiled Thee?’ In
that you say, ‘The table of the LORD is to be
despised.’ [8] But when you present the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil?
And when you present the lame and sick, is it not evil?” This is a little racket that was going on in
the temple, sort of a fore view of what happened when Jesus had to clean it
out.
There Malachi is addressing human volition,
human choice. But if you turn to the end of the book, Mal. 4:5-6, you’ll see it
always ends, at the end of these guys, they all look forward to something great
that’s going to happen in the future.
“Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of
the great and terrible day of the LORD. [6] And he will
restore the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the
children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.” See, God’s holiness is never compromised. However He pulls off this prophecy business,
it’s always a confession or revival, the blessing always comes that way.
That’s why, we’ll mention it, when Jesus came
into Jerusalem the last days of His life, He made that strange remark to the
crowds. They were gathered together and
He said you will not see Me until you say “Blessed is He that comes in the name
of the Lord,” and He’s quoting a Psalm.
What He’s saying is I’m not coming back, Israel, I can come back any
time, but I’m not going to come back until I’m invited. And the people that are going to have to invite
Me are you. You’re the ones that
crucified Me, and you’re the ones that are going to have to invite Me
back. So it’s up to the choice of
Israel, and in that sense, and this is kind of a unique way to think about it,
but in that sense Israel is a stumbling block to world peace, real world peace,
because until Israel gets right with the Lord, the world can’t get right. It’s all pending, it’s all waiting, the Jew
first and then the Gentile.
It’s interesting, we have a prophetic
calendar which we’ll study this year, the Jewish calendar has a spring cycle to
it and it has a fall cycle to it, and in the spring you have the Passover, you
have the Feast of First Fruits, and you have Pentecost. In the fall you have Yom Kippur, Day of the
Atonement, and you have the Feast of Tabernacles, and you also have the Feast
of Trumpets. But in the spring
calendar, notice, what day was Jesus crucified on? Passover. What day did He
rise from the dead? That year it was
the First Fruits day. And what day did
the Holy Spirit come? He came on the
day of Pentecost. That’s half the
Jewish calendar. The other half doesn’t fit anything yet. There are three more events in the Jewish
calendar. What are those? Apparently
they’re set in place, ready to be fulfilled, that in the fall, because the
Feast of Tabernacles represents the beginning of the millennial kingdom, I
believe that the millennial kingdom is going to fall, whatever year it comes,
it’s going to fall on that day. Now
this doesn’t say what day Christ returns, that’s the rapture; that can happen
any time. But what I’m saying is that
the Jewish calendar is only 50% filled as of today; there’s more coming. But it always comes perfectly, it just comes
right mathematically perfect, because God is the One who is the great
mathematician. He doesn’t come and say
oops, the calendar changed and I’ve to adjust it. He comes exactly on the day that He’s supposed to come.
We’ve covered Daniel and Daniel’s
decree. There’s one other thing we need
to pick up. On page 80 in the notes, I
want to deal with another problem that we get into as believers, and that is
what about the thing that we hold in our lap.
Is that the Word of God or isn’t it.
It’s a struggle, Christians have struggled with this. Notice the doctrinal statement of the
church. Our doctrinal statement does
what most doctrinal statements do when they talk about the Word of God; they
say we believe in the inspired Bible in the original autographs. That’s correct as far as it goes. The
problem is how do we know what we got approximates the autographs. It’s great to know the Word of God came, you
know, 1900 years ago with sinners and the Apostle Paul wrote it, but how do we
deal with the problem of textual variations?
That’s the issue we’re going to talk about now.
I’ll tell you why I spent time addressing
this. This isn’t just a seminary; this
is because Islam attacks right here.
The Moslems attack the Christians this way. The Muslim argues that they have direct lineage back to 600 AD on
their text because it was written in Arabic, and it was passed on by scholars
who took it right from Mohammed, there’s no breaks in it, etc. But you Christians, you don’t have a line of
text, you just got surviving manuscripts here and there, and the Bible’s
contaminated. What you hold in your
lap, is it the Word of God? It’s just a
shredded version of it. So we need the
Koran, the Koran has superior power to the Bible because the Koran has a
textual lineage that we can touch, taste and handle; we know for certain.
Let me back up one step before we get into
this. You might not always get this
from a Muslim; you can get this from an ordinary person on the street, secular
humans. They’ll argue well, you can’t
really be sure that what you guys have in there, that Bible thing that you’ve
got, you can’t be sure that that’s the way it was originally, after all, 1900
years have come and gone since that text was written, how can you be sure of
that. A quick turn around, remember we
said it gets back to martial arts and judo, one of the techniques in judo is
you take the guy’s punch and pull it further and make him work against
himself. It’s the same shrewd deal you
can work with apologetics. If you
really are convinced that we don’t have the original text of the Bible that
must also mean we don’t have the original text of Aristotle, we don’t have the
original text of Plato, we don’t have the original text of any other historical
book. So fine, dump the Bible out and
dump all the rest of the books out too. Why are you bothering studying all
those books then?
The textual evidence behind the Scripture is
much better. Josh McDowell’s book, Evidence Demands a Verdict gives you the
references of the text. What we want to deal with is the overall concept of
what happened in the closing years of Israel because here’s where the text
problem started. The reason is that the Old Testament ended here. With Malachi the Old Testament was
closed. No further text, it’s ended,
terminated, over and out! No more
revelation. For 400 years no revelation, no prophets, no word from God, only
the surviving texts of these prophets.
On page 80, “When God ceased speaking to
humanity through Israel in the fifth century B.C., there began a four-century
period of divine ‘silence’ with a total absence of verbal revelation and
confirming miracle. Several evidences
support this statement. Not one of the
many books written during this period of the silence of God ever was considered
as inspired Scripture worthy of being included in the Old Testament canon. Other evidences show that the people
themselves knew there was a silence. In
164 B.C., for example, when Judas Maccabeus wanted to cleanse Antiochus’
abominations from the Temple, he and the priests tried to decide what to do,”
and here’s a quote and I italicized a little section in the quote so you can
see how the Jews thought 160 years before Jesus. They’re dealing with a
problem, they don’t have any prophets, they don’t have any text, but they’re
conscious of that. See what’s so
interesting. Look at that last sentence
that he writes? “So they tore down the altar, and stored the stones in a
convenient place on the temple hill until
there should come a prophet to tell them what to do.” How did they know that?
Let me say that again so we make sure we
understand the implications of that italicized part of that sentence. The very
fact that they know they didn’t have a prophet tells you that they knew when
these prophets were operating, because they knew when they weren’t operating. Something about the real thing convinced the
people, and they knew intuitively, in spite of the fact that Judas Maccabeus
was a great Jewish leader, he could have qualified to have been the Messiah,
this guy knocked off some of the ugliest people in history. If you ever want to read 1 Maccabees in the
Catholic Bible, it’s a neat book, a tremendous story of Jewish history. In that Judas could have become a Messiah,
he delivered his people. But he himself
knew that he wasn’t the Messiah and not only did he know that he wasn’t the
Messiah, he knew he couldn’t even claim to be.
Not only that, he knew there wasn’t even a prophet around. That’s how they spoke. These are his words, we’re not making this
up, this is his own words.
What do we say then? A principle grows out of this, we studied it
last year but it comes to dramatic focus here. You can’t have Scripture written
without a living prophet. Those two go
together. Let me take it another way
backwards. This is what is wrong with
people in evangelical circles who talk today about this prophet, the gift of
prophecy is operating. If the gift of
prophecy is operating today, where’s Revelation 23? The gift of prophecy functions to generate the Word of God in
Scripture. That’s the way it always
has. We’ve got the record here; it goes
back a while, two or three thousand years of tradition. Why all of a sudden are we getting jerked
all around and saying now the prophetic gift doesn’t do it? It always used to, what changed here? So when we see these two, put these two
words together in your head, it’ll save you grief, believe me, because you’ll
hear people make these inane remarks
and don’t think what they’re saying.
If the Old Testament text ended here, what do
we do between the Old Testament and the Lord Jesus Christ? That’s all we’re going to deal with. We’re
not going to between the end of the Old Testament and us; we’re going to deal
between the end of the Old Testament and the Lord Jesus Christ. Here we have a period of about 400
years. How do we know that the Lord
Jesus Christ and the apostles had the Old Testament text? It’s the same question that we’re being
asked. How do we have the New Testament
text? Well how did the Lord Jesus Christ have the Old Testament text? It hadn’t been written for 400 years. It goes back to manuscripts.
I’m going to draw a diagram. Here is the family tree that’s the best that
can be reconstructed of what happened to the Old Testament writers. Visualize this as a map of the Near East,
here you have Israel and over here you have Babylon, and Egypt. So you had three centers of the Jewish
community. The people over here were
very, very faithful to keep writing the text, for reasons which we’ll go into
later. These people are called the
Masoretes. They preserved a tradition
of Old Testament texts that translators used to translate to the English
version. Jews that went down into Egypt
had a Hebrew text also, but what happened to it people don’t know, but they
went ahead and translated it into Greek, which is the Septuagint. Sometimes you’re reading and you’ll see a
Roman Numeral LXX, that’s the
symbol for that Bible. It was a pop
version of the Old Testament for the street.
They spoke Greek, they’d forgotten their Hebrew, they didn’t speak
Hebrew any more; Greek was the language of the world at the time. So they translated that Hebrew text into
Greek.
Along comes Qumran, in 1948 an exciting story
of a little Arab boy that was throwing rocks, boys always throw rocks, and he
heaved this rock up into those caves up in Qumran, and he’s used to hearing it
go clunk, clunk, clunk, and one day he heaved the rock up and it made a funny
noise. So he walked into the cave and saw these pots, and the rock had hit down
inside one of these urns. So he started rummaging around, he got his dad and
uncle involved, and the first thing we know is they discovered some texts in
there, Old Testament texts, ancient texts of the Old Testament, that were
buried by the Qumran community. This is
1948. The text dates from 100 BC. The text had been sitting there for 2,000
years in these urns. So now we have the
Dead Sea scrolls, so we’ve got three things here. We’ve got the Babylonian
text, we’ve got the Dead Sea scroll text, and we’ve got this Greek text that
had a Hebrew text behind it.
Verse of Isaiah Hebrew
Masoretic Hebrew Qumran
Greek Septuagint
Isaiah 53:1-5 Text
(ca. 980 AD) Isaiah Scroll A (LXX)
(ca. 125 BC) (ca. 200 BC)
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1 on
whom to whom to
whom
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2 form* form* form
comeliness comeliness** comeliness
see
him* see him* see
him
desire
him* desire him*
beauty
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3 man
of sorrows man of sorrows man in calamity
known
by grief knows grief knows grief
he
was despised we despised him* he was despised
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4 he
has borne* he has borne* He has borne
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5 by
his wound by his wounds by his wound
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Differences in textual readings for Isaiah 53:1-5 between the modern
Masoretic text and the Palestinian text of Qumran and the LXX. * refers to spelling differences; ** means
synonym used.
Now let’s test. That’s what I do on the chart on page 82. Let’s look at how these texts differ. Everybody says oh, there are big differences
in the text. Let’s see what the big
differences are.
I have chosen a very interesting passage of
Scripture, Isaiah 53. I’ve taken five
verses of Isaiah 53 and I’ve gone through all three of those texts. The Hebrew Masoretic text, you’ll see dates
on that table, notice the date on Hebrew Masoretic Text is 980 AD; you say wait
a minute, 980 AD. Yes, that’s the
oldest that we have of this textual tradition, this Babylonian text type. The earliest manuscript we’ve got is 980 AD,
which makes an interesting text. How
many years difference between the Massoretic text and the Qumran text, its date
is 125 BC? The Hebrew text that we have
existing is 980 AD. That’s a thousand
years between those two texts.
Absolutely true, it’s over a thousand years. The Greek Septuagint dates from 200 BC. Where do you suppose we get sources for the Septuagint, that
[can’t understand word] from Jesus day, because He quotes from it. So our Greek text of the New Testament has
embedded in it the Septuagintal text. It has other texts too but it has that.
Here are the BIG differences that people talk
about between these texts. In verse 1,
one says “on whom,” the other one says “to whom,” and the other one says “to
whom,” a prepositional difference in the text.
In verse 2 where I have an asterisk on “form*” you know, “without form
or comeliness,” we know that reference, the asterisk refers to a spelling difference,
no change in the words, it’s just spelled differently. On the second word in verse 2, “comeliness,”
the double asterisks means there’s a synonym, another noun was substituted for
“comeliness,” it means the same thing.
The other one, “see him*” and “see him*” is a spelling difference; “desire
him*” and “desire him*” a spelling difference, but the Greek Septuagint
reconstructs that sentence and makes “desire” the verb into an adjective,
adjectivally.
Notice in verse 3 where the text reads “man
of sorrows,” “man of sorrows,” “man in calamity.” That’s the difference between the texts: “known by grief,” “knows
grief,” “knows grief.” Then “he was
despised,” “we despised him,” “he was despised.” (4) “he has borne” is just a spelling difference. That’s the kind of stuff you get into. That’s
90-95 % of the stuff that’s like that.
I can bring in a Hebrew Bible and you can see all the little notes, and
sometimes if you have a Greek text you’ll see the fine print down at the
bottom; that’s giving you all these textual variations. Sometimes it’s interesting to pursue.
But out point in that there’s the evidence
that something preserved the text. On
page 82 read that text with me.
“Exactly how there came to be a fairly standard Old Testament text in
Christ’s time is not well understood.
Apparently Ezra began a movement to ‘update’ the Old Testament text into
the language of the people.” Where did
Ezra live? Babylon or Palestine? He was one that came to Palestine. If you
look up in Neh. 8:1, 2, 8, he is explaining the text to the people, meaning he
was popularizing it and translating it because some of the archaic expressions
he was smoothing out. That’s what that
means in Nehemiah 8. “Scribes after him
copied his text-type, portions which show up at Qumran and which may form the
forerunner of the Greek translation in Egypt of the Old Testament known as the
Septuagint (LXX). While this copying
was going on in Palestine and Egypt among the restoration remnant of Jews,
other Jews still in Babylon also faithfully copied the Old Testament text.
Eventually, the Babylonian text-type came West to Palestine and was selected”
by somebody, “as the ‘standard’ text for many books of Scripture.”
One little added note, we’ll get into this in
the in the doctrine next week, but what happened was that that standardization
occurred among the rabbis, and they chucked all the other texts. They decided, they must have had a
conference, it’s suspected this is what happened, they had a conference and
they said this is confusing, we’ve got people with this text, that text, we’re
going to standardize it, and they chose the Babylonian text-type and chucked
everything else. The interesting thing
was, that happened after Jesus Christ and the apostles. Which means, and here’s the neat thing,
we’ll draw a doctrinal conclusion from this later, when Jesus walked the face
of this earth with the apostles, the text of the Old Testament varied more than
it does today, because when they walked the face of the earth they had three
translations. We today have only one
left.
So they had to deal with this. They had three
different textual traditions. Do you
find stress in the New Testament Bible when they’re quoting the Old Testament?
[They] just alluded to it, quoted it, they quote all three. There are evidences of the Qumran text
quoted, evidences of the Greek Septuagint quoted in the Bible, evidences of the
Masoretic text quoted. They appeared to
be totally oblivious or could care less what text type they used. This should say something to us when we get
uptight about translation material.
That’s the way it was, I’m not saying that translation isn’t important,
we’ll get into that, but I want you to see that the text on the one hand is
very well preserved; on the other hand it does have variations that are
perfectly acceptable to Jesus and the Apostles.
Next week we’re going to get to the
conclusion of this period, we’re going to start tying it together in the form
of certain doctrines, and obviously the first doctrine we’re going to deal with
on page 83 is the doctrine of canonicity, particularly the preservation of the
canon. We’ll pull this together and
draw some conclusions.
----------------------------
Question asked: Clough replies: That’s also
the passage that talks about tongues and prophecies, and they shall cease or
not cease, and when it’s going to cease, has it ceased already or is it the
conclusion of the Church Age. But what I’m getting at is that generally
speaking your more Biblically informed people that hold to the prophetic gift
operating today are careful to qualify it as not being identical to the Old
Testament gift. They have to, because
if they’re sloppy about that identification, we’ve got a real problem here,
because what they have to shy away from is making prophetic statements that are
infallible. That’s the corollary. If
you really have a gift of prophecy the way the Old Testament people had, when
the Holy Spirit worked with those prophets it was inerrant all the way. It was a direct revelation from God about
history, etc. So your more Biblically
knowledgeable people, for example in the Pentecostal circles, that are really
godly people, are very careful. What we have out there on the street level is a
lot of sloppy talk about it, and that’s all I’m trying to correct, is the
sloppy talk, because you can’t talk without defining terms carefully here,
because you get into this.
Question asked: Clough replies: Oh yeah,
that’s why in Hebrews 2 where it says the signs and wonders, etc. came on the
apostles, and these are to apostles and prophets, it’s put together because
of this act of Scripture being
written. And the canon, when you get
into the canon, that’s what the trouble is, and that’s what divides Protestants
from Catholics on this point. Catholics
argue… see, there’s a lot of issues that come together here, it’s not just a
peripheral thing.
Here’s the difference, the two lines of
argument. The Roman Catholic Church has
argued since 400-500 AD, and as Protestants… I’d say that’s when the Roman
Catholic Church started, not at 100 AD but at 400-500 AD. Their argument is that it was the church
that gave the world the Bible; it came out of the church. Then if the church
gave the world the Bible, then that puts the church as the custodian of the Bible,
the interpreter of the Bible, see how it flows, therefore the ultimate
authority over what the Bible says because the church gave it. Now the Protestant counter to that logic is
look at the Old Testament, did the Old Testament Bible come out of Israel or
did it not? Yes it did. The Old Testament text came out from
Israel. Do we then argue that Israel
was in authority over the Old Testament?
Clearly not because all the prophets were saying when they preached the
Word of God, Israel you have departed from the Scripture. What is the standard in the Old Testament to
which Israel is held accountable? It is
the Old Testament text. And whereas
yes, Moses was part of Israel and God worked through Moses to give the text,
and in that sense yes, the text came through Israel. But once the text came into existence, that text took authority
over Israel.
In the New Testament, can anybody think of
the passage where this very argument happened?
It’s a New Testament epistle, and it’s that text where Paul says I wrote
Scripture, (I’m paraphrasing) I wrote the Scripture and if I give you another
Scripture, what am I? It’s from
Galatians 1, he says if I or an angel from heaven come and teach another gospel
than that which you’ve already been taught, what happens? It’s cursed. Just think of what he said there. If he reversed himself, he would be cursed. So once the Scripture comes into existence
they are locked up; it’s like concrete.
The stuff comes out, it hardens, it sets up and that’s it, you can’t
change it. So if you want a picture,
concrete is a good picture of this, that it just sets up and once it sets up
that’s it.
There’s the difference philosophically
between the Protestant position and the Catholic position on the Scriptures,
and everything else flows out of that.
That’s why when we talked about Genesis, and Roman Catholicism has never
had a problem with creation, no, because they’ve had the capabilities within
their logic of constantly reinterpreting Genesis to accommodate science. Rome
has done back flips accommodating the Scriptures. And it began in the Middle Ages because Thomas Aquinas, the
chief of all Roman Catholic theologians basically assumed Aristotle’s
philosophy and married the Scriptures to it.
So you have Aristotle and the Bible become dual in their authority,
Aristotle being a picture of man, the natural man’s reasoning. So you have the natural man’s reasoning unto
which we add. Thomas Aquinas’ argument
was that a human being comes to God-consciousness through their unaided mind
and then after that we add to that Jesus.
The church comes along and adds to that core that’s there prior to the
church doing it.
That’s why I keep using this illustration
about the interior decorator, when you order it the bulldozer arrives, not the
interior decorator. That’s my way of
trying to fight that argument of saying that no, the natural man is a fool, and
that’s what Paul says in I Cor. 2 and Rom. 1, he’s a fool; we’re foolish.
Therefore we don’t start with the natural man, we start with the Word of God,
and if we don’t start with the Word of God we never end up with the Word of
God. It’s got to be start and finish with the Word of God. That requires a text. That’s why we fight so hard in fundamental
circles for the text. Why are we always arguing about the text? Why are there arguments in Christian books,
arguments about what translation is best?
The world looks at that and they think what screwy people, why are they
worried about the text for? The text is
the Word of God, that’s why we’re worried about it. We have a legitimate reason to be concerned with it; we have a
legitimate reason to worry about translations, or whether the translators were
playing fun and games with the vocabulary to get a point across here and there.
We want to know that.
So the text is extremely important to us in
the fundamental camp. You can’t have
faith in the Word of God if we don’t have access to the Word of God. That’s why in history you can well imagine,
after I gave you those two views of the text, this is why if you want to read
about Huss and Wycliffe, why did the church burn those guys? Just think about it. Why were the religious
authorities ticked off that these guys were translating the text in the
language of the people? Because if the
people got access to the Word of God, what didn’t they then need? They did not need an intermediary
priesthood, in a sense they would always need a priesthood for prayer and
ministerial ways, but they wouldn’t need a priest in the sense that the priest
became an essential gap. To get to God
you had to go through the priest. That
link was violated the moment people had the text. So translating the Bible was a revolutionary act. It was an act of total defiance of the
authorities.
This is why, to this day, it’s fascinating, I
work in a prison ministry, and in the penal system, it’s just because it’s a
human system and I’m not picking on the people that run it, it’s just that
they’re humanists like the rest of our society, and they had this thing about
the danger of inmates getting together and studying the Bible. You can walk along the halls and see
Playboy, excuse me, we can have pornographic literature, that’s okay but that
Bible, boy that really is a hot dangerous document, you’ve got to watch
it. It is, because the Bible is a
dangerous document, they have it right there.
It’s perverted in how they think it’s dangerous, but you’ve got to
believe it’s a dangerous book.
So wherever the text is honored
simultaneously with a high honoring of the text you’ll have a fear of it. The Roman Catholic position is that people
shouldn’t have the Bible, this is old Catholicism, before Vatican II, that
people shouldn’t have the Bible because they’d get confused. Yes, there are confusing passages of
Scripture, but you can read the Gospel of John and it really isn’t that
confusing. What’s confusing is
confusing people who have believed in salvation by works and suddenly they read
in the text salvation by grace; that’s what’s confusing. The battle over the Scripture is a primary
battleground.
Question asked: Clough replies: That actually was a choice that Rome made to
adopt the Septuagint as their control.
Those books that the Catholic Church has were Jewish books that the
Septuagint kind of tacked on when the Jews translated their Bible. They
included those, you can buy the Septuagint in a book store today, it’s not
Catholic documents, it’s prior to Rome. And it’s the Hebrew translation into
Greek and they tacked on all those books in there, that’s the silent period. But the problem is that when the Jews
themselves fixed their own canon officially, when his text thing got settled,
they never accepted that. They
themselves rooted those things out.
Those things were considered to be wonderful reading, they were
nationalistic literature, they are fascinating literature. If you haven’t read 1 Maccabees you’ve just
got to read it, it’s an adventure story.
It’s a neat story. It is to
Israel, I guess, what the Texas Alamo is to Texas, it’s a story of the valiant
fight for their freedom. It’s a neat
story.
Also, it would be good for you to read it for
the reason that there you have a probably what’s going to happen under the
antichrist, because the man in history who most closely approximates the future
antichrist is the Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanies, and if you want to study
what the antichrist looks like, his personality, his political beliefs, how he
operates, read the biography of Antiochus because he’s a slick dude. This guy
went in there and he was humanitarian, he gave money to all kinds of people, he
was ecumenical, he believed in accepting everybody and anybody, he was very
cordial. He wasn’t Mr. Horns with a
pitchfork, he was a nice guy, except you didn’t want to cross him, then he got
ugly. And what he did is he insisted that
all religions get together. Guess what
one religion didn’t get together in 200 BC, with all the pagans? The Jews.
There’s some ways they didn’t get together,
they refused to operate in the coliseum in athletic contests naked, they
refused to eat pork, they insisted on blood sacrifices to Jehovah God. They insisted that there was only one God,
Jehovah, and all others were phony.
This exclusivity of the Jews infuriated Antiochus Epiphanies, absolutely
infuriated him, drove this guy crazy and he could not stand the fact that there
was this group of people, these hard-nosed right wing religious extremists, who
absolutely refused to go along with it, they were so antisocial, they couldn’t
be cordial to other people, they couldn’t accept other people’s beliefs, they
were these bigots. And Antiochus
considered it his role in life to get rid of the bigots. And the bigots were the Jews, they were the
Bible people. He went after them.
The story of the counter attack of Judas
Maccabeus whose name means “the hammer,” and he decided that he and his family
lived in this town, and one day he saw the Jewish priest, like the Vichy French
kowtowing to the authorities, and he said I’m going to stop this, and he killed
him and said you put blood on the altar and I’ll put your blood on the
altar. And he started a
revolution. It’s a neat story in 1
Maccabees.
To get back to the question, the reason
that’s in there is because the Jews liked that literature, it was supplementary
to the Old Testament. When Rome decided
to accept Old Testament canon, they took over the Jewish pop literature. The
Protestants, however, said wait a minute, we go back to the official Jewish
canon. What we have in the Protestant
Bible is the official Jewish version of the Old Testament. What Catholicism has is more the popular
version that has those other documents in it.
Frankly we use those other documents in Bible study. Those other documents are very handy. 1 Maccabees is a great book to find out
Greek words and how they were used because they’re later, closer to Jesus time,
so a lot of good word studies come out of them, and a lot of good history. The
problem is there’s false doctrine in them.
Prayers to the dead, you say where does Rome get prayers to the
dead? Out of these books. I think it’s Judith, one of the books,
they’re praying for the dead, so that’s where that teaching comes out of.
The context, remember we said how do you tell
a prophet writer? What’s one of the
tests? Deut. 13, theological
consistency. There are no prayers to the dead in the Old Testament. Where’s this stuff coming from? It’s just amalgamation, partial restoration,
intermarriage, Jews/Gentiles; they all got mixed together and got all these
crazy beliefs. That’s what happened in
that period of silence, so false doctrine came in through those books.
Question asked: Clough replies: From the divine viewpoint there’s only one
answer, the sovereignty of God, because they were so hated… Jeremiah had to
rewrite the text, the texts were destroyed repeatedly. The textual transmission was as fragile as
the lineage of Solomon. At one point
the Solomonic line was down to a six-year old that the nurses were hiding in
the temple to keep him from getting assassinated. When Josiah the king came into power, they couldn’t find any
Scripture. He discovered Scripture
hidden underneath a drawer somewhere, and he pulled it out and he about
croaked, because he realized, boy, I’m the king of this kingdom, this is what
we’re supposed to be following, we’ve got a big reform effort to do. So Josiah, the very reaction you get in
Kings when Josiah found the Scripture he was terrified. Well if he was terrified it means he must
never have seen it before in his life.
This is the king who didn’t even have the Bible.
An Old Testament professor once told the
class I was and I think these are wise words, to kind of visualize the
process. When you and I read the Old
Testament we kind of get a fake image in one sense, of Israel, because we are
looking at the nation through the eyes of the prophets. If we could take a time machine and go back
without that, we would have an utterly different view of Israel. We’d go down the street, they’d be talking
about Baal, we’d see pagan practices going on and we’d say this is the people of
God? This is the distinct society that
God had got through Abraham, excuse me.
We would be kind of shocked to see what really was going on. So when we do read this, this is the
purified refined version of what really happened.
The only analogy I can think of that would
make sense to us as Americans is all the time I was in school, high school and
college; I got deceived with a steady diet, diatribes against the religious
bigotry of the New England colonies. It
was constant. Arthur Miller’s play, they
always had Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, always had to do that; all Arthur
Miller did was marry Marilyn Monroe, I don’t know why they had to put his play
on again and again in English class, but this is the big drama. Well, it’s a big drama simply because he
gouges the Puritans. That’s why it’s a
big drama. The English departments know
this. By getting the kids involved in
The Crucible, oh, good American play… it’s a phony thing, it’s an absolute
total assault on the Puritans.
The best antidote to that is read the
Puritans. You can go to a library and
get, for example, Cotton Mather’s The
Invisible War and read that.
He was the pastor in Boston while all this stuff was supposed to go
on. You read what Cotton Mather is
talking about there. He had some real
problems and the Puritan pastors were trying to stop some of this massacring,
and it was hysteria that went in. They
wouldn’t listen to pastors. Don’t blame
it on the pastors, they’ve lost control, they wouldn’t even listen. So the best antidote is to read the Puritans
own writings, then you can figure out whose right in all this. But that’s too close to the Bible, we don’t
bring that in. It’s original source
material that gives you this tool.
As far as a summary of the answer, it was a
very tenuous existence and we are so used to carrying around the Scripture
without any recrimination, without any restrictions. We get so used to it.
This is unusual in history, to be able to do what we’re doing here
tonight. This is unusual. Most people don’t have the text, the
Scripture, or another area they’re not permitted to have the text of
Scripture. Think of what life would be
like in Iran right now, today, 1998. Do
you think we’d be doing this in Iran?
Somalia maybe? We wouldn’t be
doing this. This is a privilege that we have.
That’s why the Word of God is such a wonderful thing, and we have to
honor it and thank our God for preserving it through all this and giving us the
freedom, at least for a while that we can read it.