We are in Chapter 3 of Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, and Session 4 for us, and this is the Canon of Scripture. And so what I have, for those of you who are watching on video, in the description, there's an eight-page outline, and I'm not going to go through this outline today, but I want to point it out to you that I thought this would be helpful if you look at page 2, and I gave you a chronology of scripture, and BC of course means before Christ, so all these dates on pages 2. Three and four are before Christ. And then pages five to eight are after the birth of Christ.
And what this gives you is sort of a history, important historical events and writings and people and dates that will help you sort of at least figure out the 66 books of the Bible. When did they come about? How did they come together?
What is the dating of those? And I just want you to know that this is not, a lot of dates are debatable. But most of the dates here are factual. And really, there's no way I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to take the time to go through every date, every event or anything. But I want you to see a few important things.
One is on page two in 1520. A lot of people don't realize this, but the first book that was written of the Bible was actually Job. Okay, it wasn't Genesis, and that surprises a lot of people. But that's not a typo, that's not an error. Job actually predates Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, how we organize the first five books of the Bible. Another thing is if you go to page 5, you'll notice AD 52 there that Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians.
And again, those were the first two books of the New Testament. And again, a lot of people don't realize that, that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the first four Gospels that we have at the beginning of our New Testament, those weren't the first four books written. And as a matter of fact, John, the Gospel of John, was one of the last books written in the New Testament. So just for your information, but that's something for you to have and look through.
on your own. Again, I don't want to take too much time on that, but it gives you a good idea of when main characters and books and stuff, they all fit together. I just think it's a helpful thing to see.
Now, Dana asked me a question the other day about what's a succinct way to tell somebody how the canon was formed. And I just had to laugh because I don't know. There is no succinct way. And one of the reasons, if you see there's seven pages here of dates, and all those pages involve a hodgepodge of information, of events, people, writing, and how all this came together. And so it's impossible to say succinctly how the whole canon was formed.
So, what I do want to say about it is I've been studying the Bible seriously since college, and the more I've studied the historical evidence, the archaeological evidence, comparing scripture with other writings, it really is mind-boggling to know how much detail goes in to putting together the Bible. and substantiating the fact that it is indeed God's Word. And again, that's why we're spending so many chapters talking about the Bible and how it's authoritative, how it's inerrant, and so forth.
But what we're looking at today is how did the Bible come together? How do we know that the 66 books we have are the right ones? And how do we know that there are ones that are not in there that should be in there?
How do we know that? And all I can say is this, that if you take the Old Testament books that we have that were written before 400 B.C., about 435 B.C. is when the last book of the Old Testament was written, and then you have the New Testament books of which probably Revelation was written in about 95 A.D.
You take all those books, and honestly, if you study how those books were received in both pre-Christ and Old Testament, after Christ, New Testament, there's not that much debate on what was accepted. as from God. And so the very key thing that they were after is, are these indeed God's words? And how do we know they're God's words? And there's two really primary keys in this.
One is that if a prophet wrote something that was yet future and it didn't come to pass, it obviously wasn't from God. If it did come to pass, it obviously was from God. And so because, you know, approximately 70% of the Bible in its entirety was prophetic when it was written, and close to 50% of it's already been fulfilled, that gives you a tremendous amount of evidence already that this isn't an ordinary book. And other religious books don't have anything like this. They don't have prophecy.
And so prophecy is It's a huge way to be able to go, wow, this was written here, and we look at it over here, and there's hundreds of years here that have gone between these. And so a lot of the liberal scholars used to say, well, this was written after the fact. And I just want to give you one example. that I think is really powerful.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, between 1946 and 1948, and they were evaluating these scrolls and everything, one of the best finds of that was all 66 books of Isaiah in their entirety were in this collection of scrolls. And up until that time, they didn't have anything within 1,700 years of when Isaiah was written. This put the date...
at about 400 to 500 years before Isaiah was written. So it decreased the gap by 1,000 years. But we had all these copies of Isaiah.
And what scholars discovered in studying Isaiah and comparing it with the manuscripts that we had, the copies that we had, they found in 66 books over 100 pages, written pages of Isaiah that there were only three discrepancies between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the manuscripts we had. That's a thousand years, only three discrepancies. And you know what the three discrepancies were?
Spelling. All three. It was just different spelling. That was it.
It didn't affect the doctrine. It didn't affect, you know, it didn't really affect reading the manuscript in any way at all. And so that's just one example.
But what I want you to know is, is I've studied the Bible, both the Old and New Testament and the critics and what they level at. The Bible, I am absolutely convinced that the books that we have in there from Genesis to Revelation are 100%, I'd say 99.9% what they were in the original, based on the accuracy of the copies that we have. So, I want to point out to you just a few things, because again, this is an introduction to systematic theology.
And that means that every chapter we're doing is an introduction to the topic as well. The canon is a big topic. And so I want to point out to you, you know, Iris is going to kill me. Sorry, Scott.
You know, she's like, stop recommending books to Scott. You know, he's like, he's breaking us on all these. No, she didn't say that. Yeah. But.
One book, if you're going to get one book on the Old Testament documents, I would recommend this book. The Old Testament Documents, Are They Reliable and Relevant by Walter Kaiser. And this is written for lay people. It's not written for scholars.
It's written for people like you and me. And what he does is he covers sort of the big ideas here. And I'm not going to take the time to read the chapter, but he's got a chapter on the Masoretes and how they went through the process of copying manuscripts. They thought it so serious.
I want to give you a quote here that I just think is pretty interesting. The rabbi, one of the rabbis who oversaw the copying of the Masoretes, this is about 1000 AD, he said, my son, be careful because your work is the work of heaven. Should you omit even one letter, the whole world will be destroyed.
and they consider this, if they added anything to the Bible or took anything away from the Bible, not only their lives were in peril, but the lives of the people that would read it. And so they would count, if this is a copy, if they're copying this on a blank sheet of paper, like this, or a scroll, they would count everything on this sheet first. And they would usually have about a dozen people doing this and so they would all count it and then when everybody was done counting they would write down how many letters there were. They would count how many, they would also say what is the middle word, what is the word on the far right corner, what is the word on the far left corner, what is the word on the far left, right bottom.
top, and they would all agree. And if they didn't agree, they would have to do it over again. This is before they started copying. Then when they started copying and they finished, they would all count again to make sure that the count was identical. And then they would go letter by letter and look at each letter.
And this would take hours and hours and hours. It was painstaking work. But that's what they did. When they would write the name of Yahweh, they would wash their hands before they would write the name of God. then they would come back, they would write the name, they'd go wash their hands again.
I mean, it was just meticulous, very serious work. And so again, I mean, there's so many stories and different things that you read that it's just very interesting. So that's the Old Testament. So if you really want to know how the Old Testament came together and are they reliable, can we count on them?
Walt Kaiser's book, The Old Testament Documents. And then for the New Testament, F.F. Bruce. The New Testament documents, the subtitles, are they reliable?
And fortunately, that book's only about half the size of this. And again, this book isn't even that big. It's 220 pages.
F.F. Bruce's is like 120. It's a short book. But F.F. Bruce is one of the top New Testament scholars of the 20th century.
And so he wrote this book. It's easy to read. It helps you really understand how the New Testament documents together and that they are reliable.
And then if you want sort of a fun book to have on your coffee table at home, How We Got the Bible, A Visual Journey by Clinton Arnold. Clinton Arnold was one of my Greek professors at Talbot. at Biola University, and he is the world's foremost authority on spiritual warfare and the book of Ephesians. But he is a top-notch New Testament scholar.
He was the primary editor for the book of Ephesians and the ESV translation. Real solid guy, great guy. But I wanted to pass this around, and I want to just point out a few things that we talked about in our last time together.
I got a post-it here. But what I wanted you to look at is, I want you to notice this piece in the middle of the page. This is the oldest fragment of the New Testament.
It's dated at A.D. 125, so only about 30 years after the canon was completed, after the Book of Revelation was written. This is called the John Rylands Fragment, and it's in Manchester, England, and that's where F.F.
Bruce taught. F.F. Bruce was the chairman of the Bible department at the University of Manchester.
And As a matter of fact, he worked on this scroll, on deciphering this scroll, when he was a professor there and was one of the primary examiners of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So he wrote a few books on the Dead Sea Scrolls as well. But the great thing about F.F. Bruce is he was not a liberal. He was an evangelical.
He comes from the same background that I come from, Plymouth Brethren. My whole family goes way back into the Plymouth Brethren. Movement and F.F. Bruce is arguably the greatest New Testament scholar of the last century. But check that out.
Check also, this is the oldest thing we have that talks about, that gives scripture from the Bible. And it's dated, it's dated, I think in the 7th century B.C. So about...
600 BC, 600 years before Christ, this picture of this, and you read about it in systematic theology, but this contains, it's called the two thin silver rolls that contain the priestly blessing from Numbers 624 to 26, and it's the time of the prophet Jeremiah. And they were discovered in an excavation of a burial tomb near Jerusalem in 1979. So, wow, you know, almost 2400 years from when it was written it was discovered. So, pretty amazing. And then, but anyway, you can check these out. It has the oldest fragment.
There's a picture here, the oldest fragment of the Hebrew Bible until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls right here. So anyway, you can pass this around and check it out. Okay. All right, well, let's go ahead and get into the workbook.
So go ahead and go to page... Page 9. Page 9. And what is the definition of the canon of Scripture? This is found on page 39. Yes, Ethan. Yes. Yeah, all the books that belong in the Bible.
And again, we have 66, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament. And so again, there's really no discrepancy on that among conservatives for sure. Secondly, number two.
Place the following canon events or authors in order chronologically. So it gave us Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, the Book of Kings, Joshua, the Ten Commandments, and Samuel. So does anybody think they got these in order, how they were written?
Go ahead, Tisa. Okay. Is that what everybody else had?
Yeah, good. Okay. Almost everybody had that, so that's good. You're right. That was it.
And again, it's interesting, he didn't cover Job, and I'm not sure why. I don't know. If you ever run into Wayne Grudem, ask him. But he did, again, he wasn't ordering all the books of the Old Testament.
But yeah, interesting that the Ten Commandments would be one of the first things that was written down, and that is true. Okay. All right, what is meant by the term apocrypha? And does anybody want to give a guess as to what apocrypha is the Greek word for? Okay, oh, you got it.
What is it? Yeah, yeah, it means the hidden books. Yeah, yeah, so apocrypha means things that are hidden.
And so the Catholic Church sort of took that as that was written between the last book of the Old Testament, the first book of the New Testament, And so they make this case that these are the hidden books that needed to be discovered, and we're going to talk about that in a second. But what is the Apocrypha? Anybody?
Deutero-Panonical Prophets is like the collection of books that put into the canon of the Roman Catholic Church. Yeah. Yeah, so the Roman Catholics include it. Protestants do not.
And we'll talk about that when we get to number seven. Okay. Now, number four on page 10, what is Josephus? And Josephus is a significant historian.
He's considered the greatest. A historian of early Judaism in the time around Christ and even after Christ. But Josephus did not consider the Apocrypha worthy of equal credit with the books of the Old Testament.
Why did he not consider these worthy of the Old Testament? Anybody get that? now because the spirit had departed from israel and there were no prophets after arctic xerxes okay yeah good yeah i mean it's hard to get um scripture if you don't have the holy spirit hanging around yeah so yeah very good very good point and uh anything anybody else have anything on that because he wrote a little bit you know he wrote a few reasons about this did anybody have catch anything else there yeah tisa you Yeah, good.
Yep. And also after 435 BC. Uh-huh.
Right. Yeah, good. Okay.
Number five. Which 12 books, this is the easiest question of all, which 12 books were combined into one in the Hebrew Scriptures? What are they called?
Minor prophets. Does anybody have the minor prophets memorized in order? Anybody want to try it?
Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah. Yeah. Right. There we go.
Good job. Yeah, good job. Now, was that new to anybody that that was all one book at one time? Or did you know that? Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Most people don't know that.
But that's the way the Scripture. By the way, when Jesus is on the road to Emmaus, he says that the law, the prophets, and the writings are all about me. When you read this, that's the way that the Hebrews actually organized the Old Testament.
Now we have, we organize it in a bigger way, you know, because we talk about minor prophets, we talk about major prophets and so forth. But when Jesus said the whole Old Testament was about him, because he said the law, the prophets and the writings are about me, that meant the whole Old Testament is about me. So that's just good to know because, again, you might say, well, you know, Jesus only said those three sections were about him.
What about... Proverbs and what have you. So, well, Proverbs was part of the writings.
But again, it helps to know how they were put together originally before our modern Bibles. Okay, number six. When did the Roman Catholic Church adopt the apocryphal text into their canon?
What year? Yes. Yeah, 1546. That was called the Council of Trent. And again, what you have to remember is, okay, so this is 1500 years after the canons closed. The Roman Catholic Church decides to add this to the Bible.
That's a long time period. Over 1546 years, basically, or about 1551 years, because... Well, the canon was closed as far as Revelation was complete in AD 95. Okay, so you've got over 1,500 years of the church and its preaching and its teaching and so forth is using the 66 books, but not the Apocrypha. and then the Roman Catholic Church adds it. And again, there's a lot of reasons for that, but the bottom line reason was when Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the Wittenberg door in 1517 in Germany, he was protesting the fact that the church was making money by selling indulgences so that you can release years of purgatory off of your relatives or friends.
And they literally had salesmen that were going around in the streets selling these indulgences. You can buy this, you could get Aunt Betty, you can get Granny Smith out of purgatory. And the more money you give, the more years they get off of purgatory. And Martin Luther was just appalled at this.
And so there were a lot of things that Martin Luther had a problem with, but that for him was just heinous. and he nailed his thesis hoping there would be a debate, hoping he could talk to the higher-ups and go, what are you doing? I mean, where do you get this from the Bible?
So a lot of the doctrines that the Roman Catholics not only taught then but teach to this day are contained in the Apocrypha. One of them is purgatory. Another that's a biggie for Catholics is praying to the saints. And both those are big moneymakers.
Because you go into any Catholic church in the world, and you can light a candle and put money, there's always a place to put money in any Catholic church, and they'll take all the money you want to give them, but they'll say, oh, you know, you got this problem, pray to this saint. You have this need, pray to this prayer. You need this, pray to Mary.
You need this, pray to so-and-so. And again, you're not going to find that anywhere in the Bible. There's only one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ.
Jesus is our intercessor. The Holy Spirit intercedes for us. But there are no humans.
There are no saints. that intercede for us. So the Roman Catholic Church gets two of their biggies from the Apocrypha.
So what they did in 1546 is they had a council that met, and then you might be thinking, well, how about all the other councils that went before them? Didn't councils meet to decide what the canon was going to be? How do we trust these people?
And here's what I want to say. Those of you who are in deeper dive, you know that Jonathan Edwards'dad told him not to go to Harvard because he felt like Harvard was becoming too liberal. Now this was in the mid 1700s.
Okay, so you know what Harvard's like now, but when Harvard started, it was a Bible college, and so was Yale, and so was Princeton, and so was Brown University, and Cornell, all the Ivy League schools. They were all Bible colleges. But look, from when Harvard started in the late 1600s to about 50 years later, Jonathan Edwards'dad was saying, don't go there. It's too liberal.
Well, look how far it's fallen in the last 200 years. We're talking with the Council of Trent, over a thousand years of fallenness among doctrine and leadership. So the earliest councils that met were much closer to the apostles and the apostles'teaching and biblical teaching. But as they got away from it and the church became more powerful, the Catholic Church started...
adding all these doctrines. And I'm debating on whether to do this in the sermon because we're talking about Babylon and Babylonian religion and everything. But it's true that a lot of what the Roman Catholic Church does is Babylonianism. But again, it's like, how much do I want to get into that?
I don't know. Yeah. So just adding things that are man-centered rather than God-centered, or what man wants rather than what God wants. So it's not, Babylonian religion isn't taking from the Bible what's there and what God has revealed, it's adding to it.
And so Babylonian religion are all the religions that are false that are adding things to the scriptures that we should do or believe. Babylonia yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I could use that too yeah good I got another I got another Greek word to use from the pulpit Yeah. Yeah. Good.
OK, so. So, again, interesting that this was 1546. The Council of Trent was a reaction to Martin Luther and the Protestant movement. And they got tired of saying the church says this, the church says that, the church says this. So they said, if we include this in the canon, we can now say the Bible says. And that's what they did.
And to this day, the Roman Catholic Church keeps the Apocrypha in their Bibles. Now, I want you to know that when the first in your outline in 405 A.D., that's when Jerome finished, completed his Latin Vulgate. And that became the official Bible of the church for over a thousand years. I mean, on into the Reformation. They were using the Latin Vulgate.
And Jerome was a brilliant Greek and Hebrew scholar. and fluent in Latin, you know, very, very incredible scholar. But he told the Pope, he said, I don't really want to include the Apocrypha in the Latin Vulgate because if I include it, people are going to think it should be in the Bible.
And so can't we do it like a separate thing or whatever? And the Pope that commissioned Jerome to write the Vulgate refused. So Jerome had a note in the original copies of the Latin Vulgate to say, this should not be in the Bible.
It is not inspired by God. But. As soon as he was done with the whole project, the Pope pulled it out.
And what's he going to do? I mean, you don't go after the Pope. At least Jerome didn't.
Martin Luther did. Does that be somewhere where he's written down? How do we know you?
You can read Jerome's biography by J.N.D. Kelly, who was a scholar at Oxford, a church historian at Oxford, before Oxford fell apart in recent years. But yeah, J. N. D. Kelly wrote the definitive biography on Jerome. It's a classic.
So if you want to know about Jerome, it's really interesting reading to see how he commissioned the Pope and how he disagreed with him on the Apocrypha and that type of thing. All right. What four reasons does Grudem give for not regarding the Apocrypha as Scripture? They're not playing for themselves the same kind of authority as the Old Testament writing. Okay.
And? The Jewish people did not consider them to be scripture. Okay.
Right. ...authority that... right yeah yeah a lot of people don't realize that yeah but yeah it's not cited to reference it as authoritative or scripture but it is referenced and again Paul references Greek poets and so forth in you know at the at his address in Athens so and then what was a fourth thing fourth reason that grew gave that the Apocrypha wasn't included? Yeah, it contains teachings that are inconsistent with the rest of the Bible.
And I would encourage you, if you've never read the Apocrypha, you could read it online. You could just type in Apocrypha. You could read the whole thing if you want. I wouldn't waste my time.
But if you want to read a few verses of it, especially if you're tired at night and you have insomnia, Go for it, you know. But, you know, when I was, let's see, I was 19. My freshman year in college, I decided to read the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon and the New World Translation of the Jehovah's Witnesses. And so every day I'd read like two hours in the morning before I went to school. And I finished all those books.
One of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life because it was just, again, it was so boring. And... You know, what struck me is I'd read that and then I'd read my Bible. And as soon as I picked up my Bible, it was like I perked up.
The Bible isn't a live book. It just is. And when you have the Holy Spirit, you have the witness of the Spirit that testifies that this is true.
And you read the Bible and you go, this is true, this is true. You read those other books and it's like, this is stupid. This is foolish. This is idiotic.
I mean, the whole time I'm reading, I'm going, how does anybody believe this? You know, I'm going... Man, the last thing I would ever be is a Mormon or a Muslim or any of this stuff. I mean, this is ridiculous. And I was just, the whole time I'm fighting the stupid books that I'm reading.
And what I found though when I interacted with people that believe those religions, most of those people, they hadn't read their own books. They're primarily what they are because they were born into a family that was Muslim or born into a family that was Mormon or boy, but they didn't know what they believed and they didn't read their stuff. You get a few zealots that read that stuff, but they're indoctrinated and they're told not to read anything else.
And one of the great things about being a Christian is we have total freedom to read everything and compare it. and see if these things are true ourselves and be convinced for ourselves whether or not these things are true. But I'm just glad I read those a long time ago because I never have to read them again. At least I could tell people that I read them.
I'm reading Origin of Species again, which I read a long time ago. And, you know, I just I dread reading it, but I'm just trying to read a little bit of a day, a little bit every day. But I have read it before. But, you know, it's just it's hard to read stuff that's not true and that people believe.
And it's just tough. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right.
Yeah. Yeah, everybody before 1850 was an idiot. You know, all the science that we know, that we know the most about, took place before 1850. Because everything else is based on that, right? I mean, the greatest astronomer, Kepler, you know, the botanists, the biologists, the chemists, everything that discovered, everything that we base modern science on, they all were theists.
They all believed there was a God and they did science for the glory of God. But it's interesting that modern scientists today think, oh, you know, anybody who doesn't believe in evolution is an idiot. And my view is, okay, what can you substantiate in evolution evidentially? That's the issue.
It isn't the fact that everybody accepts it. Is it true and what substantiates it? And I would love to hear your teacher say what substantiates it.
You know you guys you have to be careful. I was one of those students that challenged my teachers quite a bit especially when I was in college but you know it's it's good to ask questions. and to say okay for the origin of life the very starting point what do you think is the most solid theory that backs that up?
And just see what they say. But again, get them to think about the questions that people aren't, again, they're just regurgitating material they're supposed to teach. But I like to get at what's before this. What do you believe substantiates this? And I think you can have fun with that.
So anyway, but yeah, it's... It's hard. It's hard hearing a bunch of craziness when you're in school.
Okay, number eight. What office did many of those who wrote the New Testament hold? Yes, they were apostles. And in the Old Testament, they were prophets.
And so both a prophet and apostle was given divine revelation from God. And in their role as a prophet or apostle, they would write that. And number nine, how did the New Testament authors understand the term scriptures when they used it?
What was the word that was used? The Greek word for scriptures? Anybody remember that?
Yeah, graphe. Good. Yeah, graphe is used 51 times in the New Testament.
It always refers to the Old Testament scriptures. And so they used it. When they used that, they were thinking, this is writing. That comes from God. This is revelation that's being written down that comes from God.
It's not my thought. It's not my idea. It's not his thought, his idea.
It's God that has given this to it. And that's the way the scriptures were received in both the Old and the New Testament. Number 10, was all that was written by the apostles considered scripture? Why or why not?
Okay, so if Paul wrote a grocery list, you know, he's going to Safeway, Safeway-oss. Should we include that in the Bible? No. So how do they determine what should be, what is apostolic and what is prophetic?
What do you think? Well, then they also, like, they endorse each other, essentially, where they call the reference to others'words as scripture. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, so there's pretty much three things that they look for is, is there internal consistency in the book itself? Is there anything in the book that contradicts any other received book of Scripture? Or does it jive with it and add to it so that it helps us understand this book as well? And then again, the key question they always ask is, does this Are these God's words?
That's like the bottom line. That's the number one thing. As a matter of fact, number 11 is, that's the gist of that. What is the ultimate reason books are considered canonical? It's that they are considered the very words of God.
And with the Apocrypha, there's even a lot of, I've talked to a lot of Catholics that don't think the Apocrypha is God's word. They sort of have to accept it because the higher ups say that, but I've talked to priests, um, and there's a guy named Scott Hahn who was a product he's probably one of the top Roman Catholic scholars in the world today but he left Protestantism he had the same mentor as R.C. Sproul John Gerstner's two top students were R.C.
Sproul and Scott Hahn R.C. Sproul went on to become one of the best you know greatest Protestant theologians of the last century Scott Hahn is still alive and he's considered the top scholar in Catholicism today, teaches at American University, the top seminary of Catholicism. He was a student at Princeton and at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary where R.C. Sproul was, and they both had John Gerstner as their mentor.
But Scott Hahn has gotten in trouble with Rome because he has a problem with saying that the Apocrypha is as inspired as the other books. Which is interesting. Yeah. You should write Scott Hahn and ask him. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, again, I, for the life of me, could never, it's hard enough for me to even sit at a funeral, a Catholic wedding. I mean, I just, you got to bolt me down. I'm just, I want to attack something, kill something. I mean, I'm just, I'm like a maniac when I go into a setting like that.
It's just so hard for me because there's so much that's wrong. It's just like, ah, you know, restrain me, help me. You know, Calgon, take me away. Jesus, take me away. But yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. I think there's so many things wrong with Catholicism. The seven sacraments of Catholicism that basically make you a good Catholic and guarantee going to heaven and not going to purgatory, all seven sacraments are not only contradictory to Scripture, but add in a way that it distorts the whole message of Scripture, which is that we're saved by grace alone through faith in Christ. So the basis upon which everything is based in the Catholic Church totally contradicts.
It's what this last Sunday was about, false religion versus true religion, Man-made versus God-centered. Man-made versus God-made. And that's what the Catholic Church is, which is, to answer your earlier question, it's Babylonian.
it's man trying to reach God. I mean, interesting that that's what Babel is known for, Babylon is known for, is Babel, building the Tower of Babel to try to work their way to God. And of course, that failed.
And anytime you try to do it your way and not God's way, it's going to fail, you know? Yeah. Okay. Any other comments on what is the ultimate reason books are considered canonical? He had a few things here that I thought were interesting points.
Yeah, good. Good point. Anything else? Are there any strong candidates to be included in the Word of God? That aren't there.
What's the answer? No. Okay.
Yeah. Are there any strong objections to anything that's in there that shouldn't be in there? No. Yeah. So again, he hypothetically asked the question somewhere in the chapter, if we discovered something that we thought was apostolic, should we include it?
And I thought that was an interesting discussion. But again, the point is, you know... For God to withhold something that is significant for this long, very, very, very unlikely. And again, the memory passage for this chapter, you know, in the last days, God has spoken to us through his son.
And the idea is that, what do we need added? What else do we need to know? I mean, there's things that we're curious of, but as far as how to be saved, how to know we're right with God, how to live the Christian life, I mean, we have everything we need. There's nothing lacking or missing. We have everything we need.
There was a couple other points you made, which is God is faithful and loves his people and therefore supplies them with what they need to know of. God controls history and provides it in his scriptures. sure does match his history. Yeah. Good.
All right. Let's go to the thinking critically section. Number 12. How have you seen doubt in God's word expressed in ministry?
And how have you seen faith in God's word? So let's answer the first one. In what ways have you seen doubt in God's word?
Preachers mention something true from the scriptures and then immediately apologize. Yeah. If I do that, shoot me. You have permission to shoot me. Yeah, I mean.
Yeah, there's people that don't like Paul, there's people that don't like, I mean, there's even people that don't like Jesus. It's like, man, in life, you don't like Jesus. You're in big troubles. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, yeah, so there's doubt.
I mean, you know, Ella was mentioning science. I mean, there's a lot of theologians that are theistic evolutionists, and I have a problem with that. You know, because again, now you're putting, you're saying science trumps the teaching of the Word. And so if there's anything, again, if there's any error in Scripture, How do we know what's true and what's not true?
You know, it opens up a huge door of doubt. And so John Shelby Spong, who I think he's dead, but he was the head of the Episcopal Church in America. And he wrote a few books in the 70s and 80s.
And one of the books I used for toilet paper when I got done with it. But. But seriously, he wrote that what Christianity needs to do is it has to change or it's going to die.
And what he meant by that is he's saying, well, we know that people don't rise from the dead. We know that water doesn't get turned into wine and all this kind of stuff. And he's saying, we are modern people with all this technology in the 21st century.
We can't tell people to believe in miracles because we don't believe in miracles. And here's the head of the Episcopal Church in America. And so here's a guy who's basically saying if there's anything miraculous in the scripture, it has to be reinterpreted.
And it can't mean that it's miraculous. It's got to mean something else. I have to tell you about my grandmother's funeral, where the preacher talked about that my grandmother was displaying what happened at the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, which was that when the little boy opened his coat and showed what he had, everyone else was willing to, too.
That's how Jesus made more food. And that was like my, I was probably only three years old in the Lord at that point. I can't believe there was someone in a church that would say something like that.
Yeah, yeah. Figured out how that was not a miracle. Yeah. And proved it. Yeah.
Yeah, so that's what they'll say. They'll say, like, with the resurrection, you know, that the disciples had a, they had a psychological attachment to Christ that made them perpetuate the fact that he was alive in order to cope with reality. Yeah, I mean, people just come up with. all kinds of bizarre stuff instead of the plain you know the plain meaning of Scripture yeah and again we if you look for this stuff I mean all you got to do is watch I don't even know what the Christian broadcast what is it TBN or whatever yeah watch it for maybe an hour and I can't I can't watch it for more than five minutes but anyway Ethan I think equally insidious is the avoidance of parts of Scripture.
Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, maybe call it mainline evangelical church. Right. Right. Scott, now you know.
They asked me to co-lead this rooted thing with the associate pastor. And then the term changed to facilitate, not lead, which was interesting because that would become important. So, you know, a woman in there kind of went off on a little thing, very nice woman, but unfortunately she was teaching Sunday school, so this was very concerning.
And so I'm like, well, you know, I know. Just all paths lead to God. Let's look at what John 14, 6 says. Let's see if that's compatible with that. And then after the class, the associate pastor is like, we're just facilitating.
We're just encouraging. And I'm very busy. Like, I'm not filming.
Yeah. People say random stuff. Right.
I got other stuff to do. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. But I think the bigger point is I think that is a dangerous thing now. That's good.
I mean, that's not good that that's happening. That's good that you recognize that. And yes, I think that is even more insidious. You know, where you have some truth that's being given, but where an obvious falsehood like that, especially with a pastor present, isn't nipped in the bud right there.
Yeah. Yeah. This screen's a good point. Yeah.
But yeah, you know, that's a very good point in the sense that it's not blatant heresy that's being taught. It's blatant heresy that's even being tolerated and allowed to thrive. Now, they would say, oh, well, we do believe that. We believe in the exclusivity of Christ and stuff. But, you know, there's a time and a place and this and that or something like that.
I mean, don't you guys think? Yeah. I mean, I know the pastor, you know.
Yeah. Choose your moments and not mention things here and there and stuff like that. Yeah. But again, if that person wasn't dealt with even after the fact, that would be incredibly concerning. I mean, I think they should be dealt with in that.
Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.
The situation and what really bothered me was, you know, there's some really hard and difficult questions that the culture was. Yeah. Yeah. Scripture is the answer.
It was like, OK, how can we incorporate the culture into the church? Yeah. That was the last straw for me.
Yeah. And so our next lesson is going to be on the authority of Scripture. And that's what we always have to appeal to, is what does the Scripture say about that? And I think you're right. What does the Scripture say?
Well, John 14 says, yes, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father. I mean, it's very clear.
Do we care about what the Bible says here or not? Is the Bible authoritative for our belief or not? And I think that's a huge issue.
you know yeah I would say also well since going through sinners in the hands of angry God Jonathan did you get saved on Sunday after I got I got resaved after reading that and I did Wow What an amazing sermon. Yeah. It's like, I feel that with this question, I was a little confused thinking like if it was the error of God's word or like what in God's word is not either being conveyed or. I would say like in that, I guess, aspect, people are just avoiding the truth in God's word in relation to hell, in relation to damnation and, you know, the importance of, you know, salvation. And it's just that I would say the majority of churches are too soft on that.
And I see that as doubt in God's word, especially when it comes to churches not teaching those things deliberately because they believe that they're loose followers. You know, and so they don't have the trust and faith in the Lord. word you know that teach the actual truth though it's hard right that you won't lose tithing right yeah no yeah you're right all right yeah good yeah seen faith in God's works mm-hmm and for me it's I see it expressed by those who have peace assurance love and also treasure God's Word and I see that in you, and it was a great compliment. It's very inspiring to see how much you treasure it, and your strength in it and your fearlessness. That's one of the things that when Pyron told me about this church, and I saw that you were not ashamed of God's word, and you had a certain strength that was...
something that was badly needed with all the chaos going on. And it was because of her. You are with God. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah, no, you're welcome, and I appreciate it. But again, I wouldn't have anything to say. You know, if the Bible wasn't authoritative and true, I mean, I have nothing to say. As a matter of fact, I don't even like talking in public.
I mean, I would just be holed up somewhere, you know. I mean, but again, because... there are a few people out there that are going, hey, this is authoritative, this is true, this is the most important thing. I'm compelled to do it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think it's great to have convictions of things that you believe are true and that you're willing to die for.
I think it's a horrible way to live to not have any convictions and not know what's true and just sort of float out there. I think that's a very difficult way to live. And again, why do I believe this stuff?
Because I've investigated it pretty thoroughly, and I'm convinced it's true. And I'm willing to die for it, and I'm willing to speak for it, and whatever happens, happens. But again, that's the beautiful thing, though, is I can't force any of you to believe what I believe, but I'm passionate about it because I think it's true. And I want you to be passionate about it, but I also want to encourage you to study it for yourself.
Look at this stuff and check it out, test it. And we don't have anything to be ashamed of or to hide. So I think that's a great place to be. Yeah.
Okay, let's go to number 13. In light of what you have learned about the canon, how should Christians approach Christian nonfiction books today? Like the Bereans. Okay. Yeah, so the Bereans checked. They were checking to see if the things were true or in accordance with the word.
Yeah. I got an experience where I read a Christian book, and like one guy said, if you're singing your prayers to God, that's not valid. And for years I let that dampen because I love to just sing my prayers.
And one day I went, why am I letting that run my life? Who is he to say that? And he doesn't tell me I can't say my life.
Did he ever read the Psalms? I mean, it's like, whatever it was, that half the Bible mitten out of there? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that's a good example, though, to compare what people say. Is that in the Scripture? Is it not in the Scripture? Is it something that is okay? You know, Because there's a lot of things we do that a lot of technology, you know, the Bible doesn't say anything about video cameras and cell phones and, you know, I mean, this comes all after the fact.
But I still think there's biblical principles that apply to how to use technology, for instance. But yeah. You know, I think it's interesting.
You know, I've been reading a lot of the classics, what we call classics, and some of those are being banned today. And what's interesting about the classics, you know, any book that you were required to read, you know, 50, 60 years ago. Almost all of them, all the ones I've read, have tremendous amounts of biblical allusions. I mean, they allude to Scripture, they use the morality of Scripture, it's almost like it's not even up for debate.
This is just the way things are. This is the way God designed things. And I think it's interesting that literature professors that are Christians in secular universities are under as much pressure as anybody who's a scientist to get rid of anything that alludes to the Judeo-Christian world values. And that's a huge mistake. I've seen that in the music world too.
Yeah. But they're cloaking it in being diversity, equity, and inclusion. So that's just the way the Bolsheviks used class. Right, yeah.
Using class to an extent, but more so race. Yeah. Is it… Yeah. Yeah.
And I think it's good to watch whatever world you're in, whether it's computers, science, technology, you know, any industry, whatever industry you're in out there in the world, this is encroaching on it. You know, the whole idea of what's culturally accepted or what's modern, you know, I love C.S. Lewis on this.
I love to read C.S. Lewis. He talks about chronological snobbery.
And my view is, as I read the dead guys, they're so much smarter than the guys that are alive today. They've got so much more to say, so much more depth. Modern people just don't even come close. And it's because we're specialists.
You know, we can specialize in this little teeny area here. But they knew about all kinds of stuff and how it worked together and was synthesized. And so I...
You know, C.S. Lewis's advice, and that goes with this question, how should Christians approach Christian nonfiction? He said for every one modern book he read, he read two ancient books. And I've actually taken that to heart. Anytime I read a book that's been written in the last hundred years, I read two books that were written a hundred years previous.
And it's been my experience that I get so much more out of the old stuff. Yeah. Yes.
Yeah. Good stuff, huh? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Ella's a girl after my own heart. She's a reader and likes Lewis. So what more do you need?
Yeah. yeah i remind me i i need to send her the c.s lewis stuff i have because i have over 200 books in there either by or about lewis but you you'd like it it'd give you some more stuff to read some more money for your parents to spend yeah but it's good stuff okay um you Anything else on that question, number 13? Okay, yeah. I don't know about you guys. I read all kinds of stuff, and I read even fiction, and I read non-Christian stuff.
But I find that the older I'm getting now, I'm reading less of that, and I'm trying to read more of the most substantial stuff I could find. Because again, my days are numbered. I don't know how much time I have left.
So I don't want to You can't enjoy a work of fiction or, you know, just have some light reading. But if that's all you do, you're missing out on a lot that could really help you. And I think, I don't know about you, I think we need all the help we can get living in this world.
And we need deep, solid, rooted truth that's based on God's Word. And my mom, you know, I often think of my mom. because her last probably 10 years of life, she stopped reading any book other than the Bible, and she would read it about 12 times a year. And she had these prayer sheets in her Bible that she would pray for every night, and she would write when she finished the Bible. I remember the last time I looked at it, she had read through the Bible 12 times that year, and she was on number 13 when she died.
on Valentine's Day four years ago. So she was on 13 times reading the Bible at the age of 86 years old, but she couldn't get enough. And, but I think you can't go wrong reading the Bible.
So if you're going to read anything, read the Bible for sure. That's number one. But there's nothing wrong, I think, with reading other books. And again, always have it through the grid of how does this jive with the Bible?
Yeah. Okay, number 14. If someone came to you claiming to have written a new book of the Bible, how would you respond to them based on what you learned in this chapter? that's good that's good yeah yeah yeah good Yeah, so Hebrews 1, 1 and 2, you know, that was the memory verse. And then Revelation 22, 18 and 19 also, you know.
Again, I think both those passages are very clear that to add anything or take anything away is a very perilous thing to do. I mean, the Revelation passage says, you know, the plagues of this book be upon you, you know. So it's a very serious thing. So I think the Masoretes had it right.
You know, it's like, let's get this right. If we're going to do anything. to that 100%, let's copy the Bible accurately. And so I think that, again, the more I study and the more you study, I'm convinced as well, you'll find that the Bible proves itself.
You know, it proves to be true. Not just because you want, I want it to be true. I'm not going to lie about that.
I do want this to be true. But I also believe it's true, whether I think it's true or not. sure you know but again it's it's sad to me that a lot of people ignore the evidence and just live life sort of in ignorance. I mean, I think that's a big mistake, big mistake.
All right, any questions? We got about three minutes for questions before we sing. I'm assuming, Tyron, you're ready to lead us in song in a few minutes. Okay, with Cindy's house, good, good. But before we sing, any questions?
There's something you said in the very beginning. You said something along the lines that was the heresies that helped put the Bible together. Yeah.
Well, not the Bible, but Bible doctrine. So, so theology, systematic theology, this book is based on what's in the Bible. But this isn't the Bible. It's... I would say it's biblical in the fact that what he's doing is he's taking what the Bible talks about, the major doctrines, and then he's breaking it down.
But all the major doctrines that he talks about were developed in response to heresy. Yeah, so all the early councils that met, like the Council of Nicaea and the different councils along the way, again, they got more corrupt as time went on. But the early councils were very concerned about, is anybody teaching, are any of our churches teaching, are any theologians teaching, writers, theologians, is anybody teaching anything that's contrary to the Scriptures?
And there was always people rising up that were teaching things that were contrary to the Scriptures. You know, Jesus is God, but he's not man. Jesus is man, but he's not God. Jesus only has one nature, you know, instead of two, you know, all these kinds of things. So the very first, really the biggest doctrine that was of issue was the Trinity, and in particular the nature of Christ.
But the Bible was a big one early on as well. You know, what are the biblical books? That's how the list of the canon was eventually developed. But it was already believed and received, and there wasn't a lot of doubt.
But there was no official document saying, here's what the Bible is. Because you've got to remember that they didn't have books. You know, so if you were in a church in 400 A.D., soon, you know, the Latin Vulgate was going to be available.
But before that, you'd have like, your church would have the scroll of Isaiah. And my church would have a scroll of Mark. And what oftentimes would happen is I'd get done preaching through Mark, and I'd give you my scroll, and you'd get done with Isaiah, and you'd give me your scroll. Because paper and transportation, I mean, I experienced this in Argentina. On the border of Bolivia and Argentina, I had a guy who was in his 90s, and he was a farmer and a pastor.
And he came to this conference I did there. And he had jeans on like I do and he had watermarks like up to his waist on both sides. It was dry here and it was all wet.
And I'm thinking, what happened to this guy? So at the break I introduced myself and I said, you know, I'm just curious about your jeans. And he said, well, I had to cross a river to get here. And I'm like, you crossed a river?
Yeah, river that where the water was at higher. I mean, isn't that dangerous? It's well, you know, I made it, you know, and he was all happy. And and and suddenly I noticed his Bible was wet as well. And he said, Well, yeah, I brought my Bible.
And he said, But I have to get back. I can't be at the meeting tomorrow because I got to get back to be able to give my Bible to the to my friend who's also a preacher. And we share this Bible.
And I'm going, you mean to tell me you're a pastor and your friend's a pastor and you only have one Bible between you? And he said, yeah. And they were miles apart.
So one would preach early in the morning and then he'd go halfway and he'd hand off his Bible. And then during the week, whatever text they were preaching on, they would hand it to each other so the other person could work on their sermon. So twice a week, they're meeting at some location, and they were both sheep farmers, so they'd bring their sheep along, and they'd hand this.
And I'm going, I'm thinking of myself, and I'm going, I've got, I'm thinking, I'm looking at a home, and I see my shelf with 60 study Bibles on it. And these guys have one Bible that they're sharing. This was in Bolivia. I was in Argentina.
They came over. They crossed from Bolivia. I was on the border. But before I left Argentina, I told my cousin about it, and he contacted a Bible place that publishes Bibles. They got a bunch of Bibles to him, so we got him some Bibles.
But that was... 30, you know, 25 years ago, 20 years ago. So in modern times.
Now, you can only imagine what it was like back then. Yeah. So the reality is we are so fortunate to have Bibles.
I mean, I can't even tell you how fortunate we are to have Bibles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
I'm glad you asked that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Good. Yeah. So the end of Mark.
And John, the last verse of John 7 and the first 11 verses of John 8 are the famous woman caught in adultery. If you look in your Bibles, I had Dana read this on Saturday in the Saturday class because somebody asked this question. But what it will tell you in your, if you have a Bible, if you have a hard copy Bible, it'll tell you that both those passages aren't in the earliest manuscripts. I don't think they were. I don't think that Luke passage was in the earliest manuscripts, and I don't think that John passage was in the earliest manuscripts.
Yeah, the Mark passage, I don't... No, no, no. It's two different passages. So the Mark issue is basically, if you take the last verse of Mark, it sounds like a really abrupt ending.
And the story goes that... Some Bible scholars decided to add two marks so it ended better. But you can see where they did that. So you can take the previous manuscript evidence and almost all New Testament scholars, evangelical scholars.
you know, who are like us, who believe in Jesus and the supernatural and this whole thing. I don't know of any New Testament scholar that thinks that the ending of Mark should be there, the inserted ending. So if you look in your Bibles, look at the last few verses of Mark, and you'll see that.
And the reason is because, again, the earliest man, because usually what happens is, with the earlier manuscripts, we have so many of them, we can compare, And so if you have 15 manuscripts that all agree and a manuscript pops up in 600 AD and it's got a different wording or an addition, it's like you can see exactly this is where it came from. And because it has nothing to do with all this earlier stuff, so usually the earlier reading is the better reading. That's sort of the rule of thumb. They take it out because, I mean, they don't take it out and they leave it in.
I mean, if it was up to me, I would take it out. But they do tell you. In other words, they're honest about it.
Like with the Jehovah's Witnesses, they just basically have to make up grammar to say Jesus is a God in John 1.1. and they have to start their own translation, and they don't even tell you who translated it. For all of our Bibles, you can find out who the translators are, what their, what do you want to call it, their credentials are, and so forth. But you can also, again, we can talk about it, and we can say, I can tell you almost with 100% certainty, I don't think the ending of Mark should be there. So when I preached Mark, I talked about that briefly.
I finished it where it finishes abruptly. And I said, we're not going to cover these verses and here's why. And that's the way I ended it.
When I preached on John, I said, I'm going to teach on the woman caught in adultery, but we don't know for certain. that this happened. It could be an oral tradition that is true. It is a great story, and it seems so like Jesus. Now, it wouldn't contradict anything of Jesus'life.
It wouldn't add to anything, really. It doesn't change any doctrine. But those are the two most pronounced issues that we have with our Bibles.
Yeah, those two. there's nothing like that anywhere else. I mean, pretty much we're certain of everything else, but those two are considered additions and not, and that's why that's in there.
Yeah. And the reason probably is because they were included without any references in the King James. And the King James was so widely read and used that if they would have taken that out, there probably wouldn't have been bloodshed. You know, honestly, I mean, it's just, it became such a part of the tradition.
It'd be like us throwing out Amazing Grace. You know, we're not going to sing Amazing Grace anymore. People would be like, what? That's like one of the greatest songs ever sang. How could you possibly throw that?
But if there was something wrong with it, if there was something in it that contradicted the scriptures or that shouldn't be there, then we'd have to go, okay, we're not going to do something just because it's traditional. We're going to do something because we believe it's true. And again, there's a lot more.
On the Mark one, there's a book, there's a four views book in the Zondervan series that has four views of the ending of Mark. And the good thing about reading that is it will teach you a lot about how they do textual criticism. These are four very solid New Testament scholars who deal with original manuscripts, and they talk about how you arrive at the different readings. And when I brought I brought my Greek New Testament and my Hebrew Bible last time, but if you look in those, it'll tell you where the different manuscripts are. And for a lot of scholars, you can actually look up a lot of this stuff online and you could read it in the Greek or in the Hebrew to be able to look at it for yourself.
And it'll tell you where the discrepancies are, and you can wrestle with this kind of stuff. All right. Well, let me close this in prayer, and then we're going to sing. So as soon as we close in prayer. Father, thank you for just a good discussion tonight.
We thank you for the canon of Scripture. and how in your sovereignty and in your providence, just like the timing of your son coming 2,000 years ago, you orchestrate people and events to work out redemptive history so that there's not only salvation for us, but there's also a guide for living that you've given us in the 66 books of the Bible. And Lord, we thank you for the men and women that sacrificed to get that word to us to this day. And we pray for Wycliffe and the Bible translation that's taking place around the world. There are still languages, still people groups that don't have the Bible in their language.
Lord, we pray for speed and accuracy for those who are translating. And we just thank you that we have the Bible in English so that we can read it and understand the greatest news and the hope that we have of eternity that's in the Bible. and how to live day to day. So thank you for this time. Thank you for the canon.
And we look forward to our next time together as we look at the authority of your word. In Jesus'name, amen.