Understanding Inerrancy – Part 7
1 Peter 1:10–11
Opening Prayer
“Father, we are so grateful
that we have You to come to in time of need. We know that there are folks in
this congregation who are facing challenges right now due to the job situation
here in Houston, people who are without jobs, people who are looking for jobs,
and people who are concerned about how much longer they will have a job.
Father, we pray for them. We
know that You will sustain them. We know that You are in control and nothing
that happens happens outside of Your permissive will.
All of these tests that come are designed to teach us to trust in You, to rely
on You, and they enable us to grow and mature in our Christian life.
Father, we pray Your comfort
for these people as well as encourage them and lift them up and that others in
the body of Christ will come alongside to encourage them.
Father, thank You for the
fact that we have Your Word and it is truth. We are sanctified by means of
truth and as we continue our study on the truthfulness of Your Word, the inerrancy
and infallibility of Your Word, we pray that You would help build a trust and
confidence in our souls with what You have revealed.
We pray this in Christ’s
name. Amen.”
Before we get started in our
study and in relation to that you might as well open your Bibles to Genesis 1.
I thought I would just
briefly share a couple of things. I think a lot of folks were encouraged this
last week, if not surprised, when Brice gave a report for DBM talking about how
much material is going out. One of the things he didn’t mention is that through
the podcasts in January, he sent me a report in January for how many people had
downloaded different files off of the website in the first three weeks of
January alone.
I counted up and added about
the first twenty-five. The highest was the Matthew file, which was around
12,000, and then it was 1 Samuel, which was 11,000 and something, and 1 Peter
which was 10,000 something. In these first three files you’re already up to
well over 35,000.
As you just walked your way
down even in the first 25 downloads you were well over eight or nine downloads
and the total number of downloads if you added up the first 25 or so was well
over 300,000. This just goes on for pages. That’s just the first 25.
I don’t know how many
because I didn’t look at the whole list. This means there are thousands of
people [accessing material on the DBM website]. That’s so encouraging. In fact,
at that time the number three country outside the U.S. where we
had downloads was Russia.
What did you say the other
night, Brice? The top city in February outside the U.S. was
Beijing. How about that? It’s just amazing. Then he sent me this file that
ranks from #1 down. It goes to every IP address and where it’s located and how
much they’ve downloaded.
A typical file is what size?
The audio files are what? Ten to twelve megabytes. So someone in Blairstown,
New Jersey downloaded seven and a half gigabytes. This is just in the last five
months. So one person may go to the website at one time and just spend a day downloading
a mass of material.
They may not show up again
for another six months until they’ve listened to everything they downloaded the
first time. So some people come and they come back more and more often. You
have people from some really strange places like Moosup,
Connecticut. Most of you don’t know where that is but some of you do. You
probably know who those people are who are living in Moosup.
We have people from Tel
Aviv, people from Modiin in Israel, three or four
other sites downloaded a large amount. People from Sweden. People in Saint
Lucia, two or three from Saint Lucia which was interesting. That was number 54.
This list goes on to about 8,000 who are downloading.
When you get down past about
2,500 they’ve only visited maybe less than ten times. When it’s over that it’s
at least 2,500 to 3,000 people who are making significant visits to the website
and downloading huge amounts of data.
People coming from Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, various places in Africa, a few from Saudi Arabia.
I always assume those are Americans who are working there and things of that
nature.
It’s just a tremendous
outreach. Jamaica. Eurowagon, Australia. I’ve never
heard of that place. There are a lot of unknowns. If you’re in a small place
that not on a map, it doesn’t show up with a specific location.
Anyway, I just thought that
was interesting. Here’s one from Lagos, Nigeria. All of this material streams
out and goes all over the country and the world. It’s phenomenal to see how the
Lord is using that and using the Internet. It is virtually another missionary
outreach.
You should have opened your
Bibles to Genesis 1. I’m just going to review you a minute on what we’ve done
in this whole issue of understanding inerrancy, understanding how the Word of
God came to us, inspiration through God the Holy Spirit who breathes out the
Word through the human writers of Scripture so that God oversees or
superintends or guides the writers of Scripture to record His revelation
without error in the original.
Of course the problem is we
don’t have the original. Someone asked the question of wouldn’t it be great if
we had the originals? I think if we had the originals they would probably be
pretty faded and worn out by now. The materials themselves just wouldn’t last
that long. Then there would be the tendency to idolize and worship the
originals and things of that nature.
Copies had to be made. This
is what happened in the process of the transmission of the text in the Old
Testament. In the inter-testamental period, we know
that what the Jews did is that when they had manuscripts that were wearing out
or wearing thin or fading, they copied them.
After they checked them and
verified that they were 100% accurate, they would burn the one that was fading.
We can have a pretty good idea. If you think about how many copies we have of
other kinds of ancient literature, sometimes 600, 700 or a 1,000 years exist
between the writing of let’s say Homer or Virgil and the oldest copy we have.
We may only have one copy or two copies or three copies that are dated
somewhere around AD 600, 700, or 800 and yet these were
written about 400 or 500 BC and we say these are absolutely accurate.
That’s the assumption of modern man.
They don’t apply that
standard to the Bible. We get to the Bible; they’re going to have a different
standard. They say, “We really aren’t sure.” Yeah, we have over 5,000 fragments
or full documents of the New Testament. Hundreds of times more than we have of
any other ancient document so we really can’t be sure? It’s such an irrational
double standard.
The issue always comes down
to whether or not we can trust the Bible. How do we know we can trust the Bible
and understanding what the Bible claims for itself in terms of its own
authority and its own accuracy?
If you’re not teaching
verse-by-verse then you really have such a problem with context. As you go
verse-by-verse you hit certain topics that are important in and of themselves
and sometimes they’re important because of what’s going on, what’s trending in
our culture.
As we hit 1 Peter 1:10–12
where it’s talking about revelation and how God revealed to the prophets who
prophesied the Old Testament and how they had to diligently search and inquire
about what it meant. Just because the Word was revealed to them it didn’t mean
they thoroughly understood it.
That put us on the path of
the Doctrine of the Inspiration and Inerrancy of Scripture. This is our seventh
in the series.
Our definition is that God
the Holy Spirit so supernaturally directed the human writers of Scripture, that
without waiving their human intelligence, vocabulary, individuality, literary
style, personality, personal feels, or any other human factor, God’s complete
and coherent message to mankind was recorded with perfect accuracy in the
original languages of Scripture, in the original documents. Not your King
James, your New King James or your New American Standard translations. Those
are not inerrant.
The Word of God is
infallible. It’s an accurate translation in many cases but it’s the original
that is inerrant.
Key passages that we’ve
looked at many times. 2 Timothy 3:16–17 that Biblical authority is
based on these doctrines: inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy.
Inspiration relates to the
origin of the Bible. God breathed it out. Infallibility relates to the
authority and the enduring nature of the Bible. Inerrancy relates to the
accuracy.
I ended last time with four
corollaries that are so important. People don’t understand. The doctrine itself
can be rather abstract for a lot of people but if you believe in inerrancy, you
don’t just pigeonhole it and say, “I believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of
God.”
If you believe that it has
certain critical implications and these are these four corollaries. Though
every word is equally infallible, not every word is equally applicable to the
Church Age believer. The Bible is written to different people at different
times and you can’t read “your neighbor’s mail”.
You can’t go back to the Old
Testament and read your neighbor’s mail and think it applies to you. It applies
to Israel and their circumstance but it’s infallible and inerrant. It has
implications and applications in some senses.
Second corollary: If every
word is breathed out by God, then it’s the responsibility of the Pastor-Teacher
to investigate and exegete every word. We’re to preach the entire counsel of
God. This is a mandate that if I as a Pastor-Teacher have the responsibility of
handling this Word. If I’m not getting into the original languages to the
fullest of my capability and constantly pushing myself in terms of my own study
and understanding of the original languages to handle it accurately, then I am
a failure as a pastor.
I would suggest that about
90% of men in pulpits today are failures as pastors because they’re not in the
Word like they should be. They haven’t been trained. We have too many sheep who
don’t want a shepherd who knows anything about his job.
Third corollary: If every
word is breathed out by God then that means the Bible is totally sufficient.
This means you don’t look to psychology or sociology or any kind of studies on
human dynamics to find your source of how you understand the Bible.
On the one hand you have so
many churches and so many organizations who have affirmed inerrancy on the one
hand but then they throw it away with what they do.
The right thing done in the
right way is right. But the right thing done in the wrong way is wrong. So what
happens is they believe the right thing but they adopt the wrong methodology
and the wrong methodology destroys the accuracy of what they believe.
We’re going to see that
tonight in some of the things I’m looking at.
We’ve talked about 2 Peter
1:3–4.
Fourth corollary: If every
Word is from God to us, then nothing in life is more important than learning
the Word of God and reading the Word of God.
I am so encouraged by the
number of people who told me that they’ve started reading through the Bible on
their own. You don’t know how many pastors I’ve talked to and communicate with
over the year who ask me questions. The reason they’re having a problem even
though they’ve taught the truth, they’re getting push-back from their
congregation because their congregation doesn’t know the Bible.
They’ve never read the
Bible. They’ve never heard this. Most churches and most Christians in this
country operate on what I call “pop Christianity”. It’s things like
“cleanliness is next to godliness.” They’re like Christians who think somehow
that that’s in the Bible.
They think a lot of things
are in the Bible. I got a question the other day, “The people in my church,
every time they turn around, they’re talking about pleading the blood of Jesus
about this and about that. Where did this come from? What does this mean?”
I explained a lot about it
and he said, “That’s basically what I said in my Sunday School class the other
day and they didn’t like it.” It’s part and parcel of this rancid,
non-Biblical, evangelical culture that we have where people don’t know the
Bible anymore. They’ve picked up this sort of cultural Christianity that’s not
biblical.
Okay, moving on. The next
thing I wanted to look at before we close out this topic are passages that are
perplexing, challenging. These are the passages that are challenged by
scholars. These passages are offered as evidence that there are contradictions
in the Bible. They say the Bible isn’t without error.
The first problem we run
into is understanding Genesis 1.
One of the things I want you
to understand is that we have a lot of people who are educated beyond all
levels of credibility today. They really don’t want to believe the Bible any
more but they can’t say they don’t want to believe the Bible so they come up
with a lot of ways to re-interpret the text so they can claim to say it’s the
Word of God but it really isn’t the Word of God to them.
This is endemic in the New
Testament departments and the Old Testament departments at most of the
seminaries that have been favorites over the last 50 to 75 years. This is why
in the last 20 years or so you’ve had the development of new seminaries, like
Tyndale Seminary in Fort Worth and Chafer Theological Seminary.
By the way, things are
really improving with Chafer this year. We continue to pray and we’ve seen a
tremendous turn around in the income. I think that’s because we were able to
get some focus.
We hired a new executive
director this last year, Mike Riegel from Preston
City Bible Church. He’s really been able to focus things and to accomplish
things and move things down the road.
Once people understood that
we’re going somewhere so they’ve been supporting it. We still need to think
about having a president. That’s going to entail waiting for the Lord to
provide the funds for that. That’s going to come and we’re moving in that
direction.
There’s also another school
in North Carolina in Charlotte. Southeastern Evangelical Seminary that was also
founded in the 90s by Norm Geisler. Some of your know
who Norm Geisler is. We used to call him Storming
Norman when he was teaching at Dallas Seminary. He understands that there are
battles that you have to fight and he’s not afraid to fight them. He’s probably
in his 80s now and he’s still fighting the good fight for orthodoxy and doing a
great job.
These schools have come
along because the older schools have started to fail. We learned a little bit
about that when I read the article by Bob Wilkin, “Can
We Trust New Testament Professors?” He was a New Testament scholar.
We need to have an Old
Testament scholar write one titled, “Can We Trust Old Testament Scholars?” The
answer is no. Many of them have really left the field of orthodoxy. One of
these areas we have is in the area of creation.
The creation account is
really challenged on a couple of different platforms. The problem is that if
you read the text at face value, Genesis 1 or Genesis 2 or the first eleven
chapters, then you’re left with the understanding that the earth is probably no
older than 4,000 to 5,000 years old.
One of the ways you reach
that conclusion isn’t because of what’s in Genesis 1. I often hear people say,
“If you interpret Genesis 1, you’re going to have to come to a young earth.” I
don’t see numbers there.
If you interpret the
genealogies in Genesis 5 and Genesis 1, you’re going to be forced to a young
earth because there are no holes in those genealogies. You have two kinds of
genealogies in the Scripture. You have the genealogy like you have in Matthew
1.
Matthew has no numbers and
it may skip two or three different generations because it’s giving the line,
the flow of the lineage, down to David and then down to Jesus. It’s not
claiming to give every person in the line.
But when you get into, for
example, Genesis 5, once you start locking in the numbers you’re left with an
understanding that you’re being given a straight chronology.
When you read that Adam
lived 130 years and begot a son in his own likeness after his image and named
him Seth, we know that this is 130 years after Adam was created. I’m amazed at
how many people look at that and think it’s after the Fall.
What is one of the very
first things you hear in the first day in Genesis 1? At the end of Day One God
said it was morning and it was evening, Day One. At the end of the Sixth day
[after God created Adam and Eve] then there’s the seventh day. How old were
they on the seventh day? One day old.
How old were they on the
first day of the second week? They were two days old. Chronology started on the
first day even though the sun hadn’t been created yet, there was still earthly
rotation and there was evening and there was morning. That means that once the
clock starts it starts and you count.
That means they weren’t in
the Garden more than probably seventy years at the outset, maybe eighty years.
Why do I say that? Because Seth isn’t born until after Cain killed Abel. You
can think that Cain and Abel were 15, 20 or 30 years old. Let’s say 30 because
everyone lived a long time. Then that means that when Seth is born, Cain would
have been born 20 or 30 years earlier.
There really is a time limit
on how long Adam and Eve could have been in the Garden. No more than even at
the outside no more than 100 years. That really limits it. You can’t ram, cram,
and jam a lot of time into that. The Bible won’t allow it.
So Adam lived 130 years and
begot a son in his own image and named him Seth. After he begot Seth the days
of Adam were 100 years and he had sons and daughters. We’ll come back to that
in a little bit. He had sons and daughters. All the days that Adam lived were
930 years and he died.
Seth lived 105 years. So if
Seth lived 105 years to begot Enosh that is 105 years
plus 130 years. That would be 235 years after Adam was created that Enosh was born. So you can pretty much figure out the
chronology. I had a professor in Hebrew who had written his doctrinal
dissertation on the Table of Nations, Al Ross, who is a world class Hebrew
scholar.
He went on to write his
Ph.D. at Cambridge on Rabbinical studies. I asked Al one day, “Are there any
gaps in the genealogies?” He said “No.”
Exegetically on what the
text says in and of itself, the earth cannot be any older than about
4,100–4,200 B.C. at the outside no matter what you do.
We have a problem with all
this other evidence we have from the so-called dating mechanisms. That’s the
problem that we have. Science goes out on the basis of empiricism, figures out
what the various deterioration rates are in the various systems. Those systems
are called clocks. I presented the data on this in the Genesis
series but if you look at these various clocks they don’t agree.
You look at the silting, the
delta of the Mississippi River and it’s going to give you one age. You look at
radiometric rates and they don’t agree. They give different dates. You can look
at all kinds of different clocks or deterioration rates and they give you
different ages.
That affects archeology as
well. So when archeologists are dating certain things, they’re looking at
stratification evidence. They also use different kinds of carbon dating and
radiometric dating to come up with their degrees. If their assumptions on the
decay rates are wrong, then their dates are wrong.
The only thing we have to
count on with certainty, if we start with an inerrancy supposition, are the
numbers in Scripture. That’s why we say the earth was created somewhere around
4100 BC or maybe 4200 BC. There are a couple of reasons people go
with different dates but it’s close to that.
It’s certainly not more than
5,000 or 6,000 years. It’s not 10,000 or 100,000 or 3 million years. You can’t
get around it. There is a head-on collision between what the Bible says and
what modern science says. The problem you have with any scientific basis is
that they’re assuming certain things in evidence in terms of these decay rates
that may not be true. That’s why you have all these conflicts.
When you have these
scientific models that claim one age for the earth and one age for mankind and
they date these various fossils a certain way because of the fact that they’re
found in certain strata. They date the strata because of the fossils and it’s
all circular reasoning. That’s going to set up a conflict.
So you have evangelical
scholars who come along and the text forces them to a conclusion of a young earth
but oh, the mass of evidence in science … “We’re just not academically
respected. We go off and get our second doctorate or our first doctorate at
Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Cambridge or Basil or Edinburgh or Aberdeen or
Birmingham. We go there and we’re looked down on as these backward, frontier
evangelicals who don’t know enough to come in out of the rain because they
think the earth is a young earth.
They feel threatened by that
so they have to figure out ways to somehow accommodate human viewpoint systems.
There’s always been this kind of conflict. In the earlier 20th
century and back into the 19th century, after Darwinism first came
out, this was part of the rise of liberalism.
Liberalism came along and
assumed science was right. You’ll see this thought pattern many, many times. We
see it in this and we see it in other areas. They come along and assume science
is right so therefore, the Bible must be wrong. “Hah, but we can’t lose
Christianity. We have to save Christianity. We have to save the Bible.”
They adopt a methodology
that they think will save some part of the Bible, the ethics and morality of
Christianity, but what happens is that methodology ends up being destructive of
Christianity in and of itself. We even see examples of that in
dispensationalism.
A couple of the founders of
the idea of progressive dispensationalism were professors of mine at Dallas
Seminary. I remember them saying, “Oh, we just can’t really believe in
traditional dispensationalism. There’s this problem and that problem. The
Covenant theologians keep accusing us of this and that. We have to come up with
a new method.”
Remember, I said a right
thing done in a wrong way is wrong. What they’re coming up with is new methods.
They thought they needed a new method of hermeneutics so they could save
dispensationalism. What has it done? It’s eroding dispensationalism. It’s not
saving it. It’s destroying it.
Progressive
dispensationalism is so esoteric that most people don’t really teach it or
don’t really understand what its impact is even on eschatology. So all of this
is a result of the fact that people are depending on human viewpoint.
That’s their presupposition.
They come up with some different methodology to interpret the Bible. You have
this conflict in Genesis 1 in creation and also in the different details
between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. We’ll get into that.
There are a number of people
who criticize the Bible and say there are obviously different accounts of
creation: Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:4 gives us one story of creation. Then
Genesis 2 gives us another story of creation. They argue that there are
contradictions between the two. I’m going to look at that before we’re done
tonight, that there are contradictions between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.
If I mention a name I would
be shot down for just being mean and nasty and personal. You’d be amazed. I had
a conversation about twenty years ago with someone who is now a pastor in this
town who is pastor of a decent church. He told me twenty years ago that he
couldn’t resolve the conflict between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Your mouths
would drop open if I told you who it was.
That was his comment and
this is just buying into liberalism and listening to what they say.
Let’s give you a little
background. I don’t want to get into the weeds on this because this gets really
technical and it kind of turns my head inside out when I’m studying it. I know
it would do that, would just scramble your brain. I’m going to try to just give
you just sort of a very high overview of this.
Starting in the 1700s coming
out of the Enlightenment period, which was called that in contrast to the
period before that which was called the Dark Ages. Why did they call them the Dark
Ages? It was an insult, a pejorative term. Back before Descartes, back before
the beginning of the Enlightenment, everyone was stuck in the superstition of
believing that the Bible was the source of truth.
The very term, Dark Ages and
Enlightenment, are terms that have a spiritual and theological overtone—that we
were in darkness until we discovered man’s use of his mind independently from
the authority of the Scripture. So as the Enlightenment advanced from the 1600s
to the beginning of the 1700s, there was an approach to biblical study that
developed that was called “higher criticism” or “historical criticism.”
I didn’t make a slide on
this but there’s higher criticism and lower criticism. I don’t know why they
call them higher and lower. Lower criticism relates to textual criticism which
is very valid. Lower criticism is that we have many copies of a passage. Some
copies have one word. Some copies omit that word; other copies have a different
word. It’s the study of comparing texts and determining which was the original.
We do that all the time and
it’s a very good study which is very important and very valid. Higher criticism
was also known as historical criticism. Historical criticism really is sort of
an umbrella term for four or five different kinds of methodologies. You don’t
need to know those.
One is called source
criticism which is the idea that you have to understand that the Bible wasn’t
written by whoever it claims it was written by. That’s the foundational
assumption in all of these methodologies that the Bible was written by man.
Therefore we have to understand how these men cobbled it together.
They came up with a view
that developed through the 1700s of two different authors in Genesis. If you
want a more detailed study of this you can go back and listen to the third
lesson in the Genesis series. Two different authors came up with this. One
of them favored the name “Yahweh” or Jehovah.
He was called because
there’s this interplay in German between a “j” pronounced like a “Y” so he was
called the Jehovah or the “J” writer. Then you had another writer and he
preferred the name Elohim, the “E” writer. The J writer and
the E writer. Then as they progressed they came up with the idea that there was
another guy, another theme in all of this and that’s the person who is really
interested in the ritual and the law and all of the sacrifices. That’s the
priestly writer. He’s designated “P”.
Then there’s a fourth guy
and he’s concerned about the law, all things legal. He was called the “Deuteronomist” or “D”. The theory became called the “JDEP” theory
and is always referred to as the documentary hypotheses.
For many of you this gets
out into esoteric ideas because you’re outside the realm of college or
university. If you’ve got children or grandchildren that are going to go to
college or university or are there now, they’re going to be taught this.
The first time I ever ran
into this I was a freshman at Stephen F. Austin University in a Western
Civilization class and the professor was teaching that Moses didn’t write the
Pentateuch. He said the Pentateuch was written many, many years later, after
the Babylonian captivity. There were these four sources and you had someone
come together and edited them and cobbled it all together and that’s how we got
these accounts.
They said that God didn’t
reveal it. These were just these different traditions cobbled together and
finally put in their final form after the 19th century. In fact,
earlier when it first came out the authors, Julius Wellhousen
and K.H. Groth who were the ones who formulated this
theory in the 1900s as it had developed. They’re the ones that really made it
popular.
Their original dates were
that the “J” author wrote about 850 BC. The “E” writer wrote about 750 BC. and the Deuteroronomist wrote about 621 BC. and the
“P” writer wrote around 570 BC., which would be during the Babylonian
captivity. At least their initial theory was that everything was written before
the Babylonian captivity.
It wasn’t long until you get
in the early 20th century and the dates moved into the period after
the Babylonian captivity.
Umberto Cassuto,
someone you’ve probably never heard of, was a brilliant rabbinical scholar. He
was Italian. He wrote a little tiny book, about 90 pages, called “The
Documentary Hypotheses” which just decimates the whole theory because it’s
foolish.
People who want to refute
the Bible hold on to this theory, no matter what the evidence is. That
professor that I had at Stephen F. Austin, I haven’t talked to in years or
decades. In the late 80s I was back in Nacadoches and
went over and had coffee one day. By then I was well versed in all this which I
was not when I was a freshman in college.
He was just a committed
liberal Methodist. He wasn’t going to pay attention to anything. Umberto Cassuto wrote this in the 1930s and here this professor was
teaching something in the 1970s that had been refuted by scholar after scholar
but they were conservative. He still taught it. It’s still being taught today
in seminaries and in Western Civilization classes and in liberal schools.
All over this country,
they’re saying Moses couldn’t have written the Bible. This comes out of this
historical critical methodology.
Cassuto writes in his book that by the early 20th
century he says, “There was not a scholar who doubted the Torah was compiled in
the period of the Second Temple.” That’s after they came back from Babylon.
Second Temple was completed in 517 BC so this shows that this was being taught
before World War II. Not a single respected scholar is dating the Torah before
the Babylonian captivity, not to mention even back to Moses.
Then he writes, “It is true
that differences of opinion with regard to details were not lacking.” They
couldn’t agree on it happened but they all agreed on one thing. It can’t be
from God. I can’t be from Moses. It can’t be from 1400 BC.
Cassuto continues, “It is true that differences of
opinion with regard to details were not lacking: one exegete declared this
source the earlier source and another exegete that source; some attributed a
given section or verse to one document and some to another.”
Some will say, “Well, this
verse here was written by the “J” author.” Another says, “No. No. No. That was
written by the “P” author. They couldn’t agree. They don’t apply this kind of chopping
up methodology to any other ancient document.
He goes on, “Certain
scholars divided a section or verse among the sources in one way and others in
another way;”
“… there were those who
broke down the documents themselves into different strata and others who added
new sources to those already mentioned, and so forth. Nevertheless even though
no two scholars held completely identical views, and though these divergences
of opinion betrayed a certain inner weakness in the theory as a whole, yet in regard
to the basic principles of the hypothesis almost all the expositors were
agreed.”
They agreed it couldn’t be
Moses. Their presupposition is that God can’t communicate to man. It’s
anti-supernaturalism.
Then another writer, Kenneth
A. Kitchen in his book “The Ancient Orient and the Old Testament” said,
“Nowhere in the Ancient Orient is there anything which is definitely known to
parallel the elaborate history of fragmentary composition and conflation of Hebrew
literature as the documentary hypotheses would postulate.”
“And conversely, any attempt
to apply the criteria of the documentary theorists to Ancient Oriental
compositions that have known histories but exhibit the same literary phenomena
results in manifest absurdities.”
The method destroys the
text. A right thing done in a wrong way destroys it. You got to do it the right
way. So this is what’s going on with higher criticism.
In the New Testament you
also have a form of higher criticism that effected gospel studies. They said
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the synoptic gospels but there are a lot of verses
that are almost identical and some that are different. They posited that Mark
was the first one and Luke and Matthew borrowed from him and added other stuff.
I think it’s completely
different from that.
Then they said they had an
original source. They called it “Q”. We’re going to look at some of the
contradictions when we get there, alleged contradictions in Scripture, like the
differences between Matthew and Mark and Luke in different places.
See, folks, what’s important
is that this leaks out of the seminaries. Some of you are interested in this.
Some of you are not. I’m trying to just hit the high points. I’m showing you
how important this is.
Just to tell you a little
story: Years ago Pam and I went on a trip to Greece and Turkey with Ed Hinson
and Tim LaHaye. Ed Hinson, of course at that time,
was assistant to the dean at Liberty University, who was Jerry Falwell. We had a great time on the trip. Tommy Ice had his
iPod with him [this was before iPhones]. He always
had his iPod earbuds in. Whenever we were on the bus
and going places, he was always listening to his iPod.
Hinson was sitting on the
bus and he said, “Tommy what are you listening to all the time?”
Tommy said, “I’m listening
to Robby’s Genesis series.”
They got in a conversation
later on and Tommy said, “You know, Robby just gave the greatest talk about the
documentary hypotheses to his congregation.”
Hinson said, “Why would you
want to teach your congregation that?”
Tommy said, “If pastors
don’t train their congregations in these areas, who is going to do it? Their
kids are going to go off to school and get slaughtered in the classroom.”
Ed didn’t have an answer to
that.
That’s why this is
important. It has to be taught and it should be taught from the pulpit. The
fact that it’s never taught from the pulpit is one reason that 90% of kids who
grew up in Sunday School classes in American evangelical churches throw away
their Christian faith within three months of going to college. They’re not
given a foundation and the intellectual ammunition to handle the assaults when
they get into the classroom.
One form of historical
criticism is called source criticism. Another form is called form criticism,
which will break down the sections of Scripture into subsections and then it
looks at these subsections like Genesis 1 or Genesis 2 and it assigns to them
certain literary genre.
Before we ever study the
text we’re really assigning it genre and then that genre determines how we
interpret the text. For example, I mentioned that a few times when we went
through Revelation is that there is an extra-biblical category or type of
literature that mimics prophetic stuff in Daniel and some of the other passages
in Ezekiel and Isaiah. But it’s not the same. It’s not prophetic literature.
Scholars call it apocalyptic
literature. I remember when Andy Woods was going through his doctoral program
at Dallas Seminary and was taking a hermeneutics course with one of the
professors there. It was all about genre. You had to understand the genre
because that determined how you interpreted it.
That’s a way to avoid the
literal, historical, grammatical interpretation of Scripture. The big thing was
that you had to interpret Revelation as apocalyptic literature. If apocalyptic
literature is an extra-biblical or non-biblical category and you come and
impose that on the Bible, you’re going to misinterpret the Bible.
This is exactly what has
happened. You have this apocalyptic genre category. You have this category of
origin stories. You have a category of legends and myths. I can see now we’re
not going to get into the New Testament but all of this important because of
what’s happening here and now.
This isn’t off in some ivory
tower somewhere. This is just the background to orient you to what’s going on,
that these methodologies that are not biblical are used to re-interpret the
text. The problems are the methods themselves.
One of the things they come
up with is that Genesis 1 and 2 are origin genre and they’re poetry. Now much
of the Old Testament is written in poetry but that doesn’t mean it’s not still
history in poetic format. They assume that if it’s poetry that excludes it from
being historical.
What they’re trying to do,
folks, is to dehistoricize [that’s a good word for
your crossword puzzle] the text. They say it isn’t talking about history. If
Genesis 1 and 2 are not talking about history, about real history with real
people, then you can believe it and you can even say it’s inerrant, but it
doesn’t have to be true because it’s not written in an historical genre because
it’s poetry.
See how they’re trying to
get around this. They use this historical critical methodology and they impose
this on the text. They look at this and they say these are different things.
Let’s just look at one of
their claims. The claim is that there is an inconsistency between the accounts
in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Genesis 1, for example says you have vegetation appearing
on the third day. This is in Genesis 1:11. We’ll start at the beginning of the
day in Genesis 1:9, “God said, ‘Let the waters of the heavens be gathered together in one
place and let the dry land appear. And it was so. God called the dry land earth
and the gathering together of the water he called seas and God saw that it was
good.”
Then the alleged conflict
starts in Genesis 1:1l–12, “Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields
seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is
in itself, on and earth’; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the
herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit,
whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”
Now they come along and they
say that it’s the third day. They say, “See, God creates this on the third day.
He doesn’t create man until the sixth day. But in Genesis 2, we read starting
in verse 4 [actually the creation story ends in verse 3], “… in the day that
the Lord God made the earth and the heavens”. This is a summary statement.
Genesis 2:5 says, “Before any plant
of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For
the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to
till the ground;” This is describing the status before there was a man.
That’s what it says. Before
there was a man to till the ground. “But a mist went up from the ground, watered the
whole face of the ground and the Lord formed man of the dust of the ground.”
This is summarizing what the
conditions were on the earth before God created man. It’s talking about the
plants of the field. These were the plants that were agricultural that needed
the tilling of man. There are two categories of vegetation. Vegetation that God
created on the third day. He also put seeds in the ground that were dependent
upon man before it would start to produce.
In terms of summarizing
this, Genesis 2 is designed to add detail and supplement and expand the account
of the six days of creation that’s described in Genesis 1. It’s not a conflict.
It’s an expansion and supplementation. In Genesis 1:26–27 the creation of
mankind as both male and female is summarized. The details are given in Genesis
2.
In Genesis 1:26–27 God says,
“Let Us make
man in our image, according to Our likeness. So God created man in His own
image and in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them.”
That’s not giving the details. It’s just summarizing what happened on the sixth
day.
Genesis 2:5 is describing
specific vegetation that is related to cultivated vegetation that would be
dependent upon the work of man in tilling the soil. Genesis 2:4, as I
explained, takes us back to the day the Lord made the heavens and the earth
before any plant of the field was on the earth and before any herb of the field
had grown.
The Lord God had not caused
it to rain yet. This is before the work of the third day began. Verse 4
describes details about the nature of the hydrological system of that period.
The sprouting of certain kinds of vegetation was retarded due to its dependence
upon man’s agricultural work.
There’s no conflict there if
you’re willing to take the time to understand how the text complements each
other. If your assumption is that no, this is just man’s work, then that’s what
you’re going to see.
A second problem people
bring up is where in the world did Cain get his wife? Who did Cain marry? So
we’re told that Adam and Eve had two sons initially. They had Cain and Abel.
We’re not told about other brothers and sisters but in the genealogies in
Genesis 5 we’re told they had other brothers and sisters. That’s what I read
earlier.
After Adam begat Seth in
Genesis 5:4, Adam had sons and daughters. They married each other. People say,
“Oh, that’s terrible. That’s incest. How in the world could God let that
happen?”
The reason incest is a
problem is because when two people who are closely related genetically then
they can have offspring that have all kinds of problems. We all joke about
certain parts of the country where the family trees don’t fork. The IQs aren’t
very high.
There’s one joke about a
couple of people from Arkansas [I like Arkansas] who went to California. So
they were out there for five years. They went to a judge to get a divorce. When
they got a divorce they asked the judge, “Now that’s we’re divorced we’re not
husband and wife but are we still brother and sister?” We have all heard jokes
like that.
It’s not because there’s something
inherently wrong with a brother and sister getting married because that’s not
prohibited in Scripture until you get to the Mosaic Law. The reason is that God
built into Adam and Eve this huge gene pool. Until the gene pool gets spread
out and minimized, it’s not a problem. You have so much genetic possibility
between a brother and a sister that it’s not going to cause problems.
It’s not prohibited in the
Law until you get down to the Mosaic Law because you’ve narrowed the gene pool
so much that now you’re going to start having a lot of problems.
Abraham was only telling a
half-truth when he told Abimelech that Sarai was his
sister. She was his half-sister. You have this all the way through Scripture.
This is not a problem and is not a conflict even as you go through the early
part of Genesis where it happened.
Another example of an
alleged conflict is Numbers 25:9 compared to 1 Corinthians 10:8. Numbers 25:9
[you might want to turn there and make some notes if you want to be able to
handle this later] is talking about that prophet from the Mesopotamia area,
Balaam, and the plague that follows after he tells the Moabites to allow their
women to go out and seduce the Israelites. They seduce them into the worship of
Baal. As a result of that God brings a judgment on the Israelites.
The text in Numbers 25:9
says that twenty-four thousand were killed in that plague.
In 1 Corinthians 10:8 when
Paul is summarizing it he says, “Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of
them did, and in one day twenty-three thousand fell;”
Wait a minute. There’s a
conflict in the Scripture. No, there isn’t. Numbers 25:9 is giving a total
number that is beyond the number who died in one day. Paul is saying that in
one day twenty-three thousand died. It’s very possible that in another day
another thousand died. It’s not a conflict.
There are ways to understand
and explain the text where there’s not a conflict.
Another example of an Old
Testament conflict is in 2 Samuel 24:1 in comparison with 1 Chronicles 21:1
when David sinned against the Lord by having a census and a numbering of the
people. We’re told in 2 Samuel 24:1 that “The anger of the Lord was aroused against Israel,
and he moved David against them to say, ‘Go, number Israel and Judah.’ ”
That verse seems to indicate that God is the one instigating this.
1 Chronicles 21:1 talking
about the same event says, “Now Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel.”
This is probably very close to kind of situation that we have in 1 Kings 22
where you have this Micaiah, this prophet, who comes
to Ahab. Ahab wants justification to go into battle with Jehoshaphat against
the Syrians and so all the prophets who are “yes men” trot out and tell him the
Lord wants him to do this. Finally Ahab says, “I just want someone who will tell me what
God really says.”
Micaiah comes out and he’s very sarcastic and
says, “The
Lord’s going to give you victory.”
Ahab says, “Just tell me the
truth. I know that’s not what God said.”
Micaiah tells him that he saw in the heavens all
the sons of god which would include the demons, fallen angels as well as the
elect angels. God says, “Who is going to go forth and be a deceiving spirit for me in the mouth
of these prophets?”
One of the fallen angels
says he’ll go. We see the interplay there between God’s permissive will and
directive will there when he’s bringing judgment against Israel. God is the one
who ultimately allows this deception and is using this deception to bring
judgment on Israel and the fact it is a demon who goes and deceives.
We have the same thing that
happens. God is the one who is behind it in terms of His permissive will. God
uses the demon and Satan to accomplish His task in teaching and instructing
just as He allowed a messenger of Satan, literally an angel of Satan in the
text, to torment Paul. There’s no conflict here whatsoever.
Those who believe in the
error of the Bible always bring out this example.
I want to give you one more
example. This is an interesting one.
2 Chronicles 4:2 describes
the laver outside the Temple. “Then he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the
other.” If you assume an 18” cubit, this would be 540 inches. “It was completely
round. Its height was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits measured its
circumference.”
Thirty cubits if we multiply
that by pi, which is 3.1459 then we come out with a circumference of 565
inches. “Oh, the Bible’s wrong. There’s an error there.”
The difference is that the
diameter is measuring from outside to outside. The circumference is measuring
the inner rim. So they are not measuring the same thing. This way you can
easily reconcile the two different measurements. The inside diameter would be
ten cubits or 180 inches minus the two handbreadths which is the width of it
which would be eight inches and then you come out with the same number on both
sides.
That’s just an example of
some different things that are brought out to point out that there are errors
in the Bible.
Next time we’re going to
look at some New Testament passages and there’s one situation that’s occurring
that actually has relevance for Houston, Texas because the man, the professor,
the scholar, who is the cause of this enormous uproar is now teaching at Houston
Baptist University. The President of Houston Baptist said, “He’s such a godly
man. He defends the orthodoxy in Scripture.”
But he’s a heretic. He got
fired from about three different seminaries and a couple of organizations over
a period of two or three years because of his positions and then Houston
Baptist University picked him up. So we’ll look at that because that is a
current situation still causing a lot of waves.
It’s all related to what I
talked about earlier. Historical criticism. Then we’re going to bring up some
other things because I want to point out how some of this has infiltrated,
which we know from Wilkin’s article, New Testament
departments.
We have to be prepared to
answer these things. Peter said we have to be ready to give an answer for the
hope that is in us. There are a lot of tools, a lot of books out that deal with
these issues that you can consult. I’m just sort of giving you the quick
version.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this
time that we’ve had to be reminded that Your Word is accurate. That it does not
contradict itself. Even though an initial superficial look or a glance at a
passage may indicate a conflict or disagreement we know that when we study it
more fully in detail and really come to understand it, that there aren’t
conflicts.
Even in those few cases
where we’re not sure we know that it’s not a problem with the text. It’s just
our problem of understanding all of the details surrounding the text.
Father, we pray that we
might have confidence in Your Word that no matter what happens, we fully trust
it. We believe it’s sufficient and we rely on You no matter what circumstances
are taking place in our lives. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”