(10) The Inerrancy of Scripture

This morning we're going to be talking about inerrancy. Ironically, when I sent this to my dad to print it out, there were errors in it and he had to fix them. So hopefully we won't find any more as we talk about inerrancy. How many of you have even dealt with inerrancy before? Has anyone? I can imagine Steve has.

Inerrancy is an interesting thing because it is... It is basically a prerequisite, at least to me, to be an intellectually honest Christian. If the Bible is full of errors, then how do we know what is true and what's reliable in it? Let's read this definition here and then we'll talk about a practical current event that ties in with this. Inerrancy is the idea that something is without error. Speaking of the inerrancy of Scripture is the idea that Scripture is without error. By claiming that Scripture is inerrant, It points to the idea that the biblical texts are preserved by God so as to convey His message without error.

Okay, how many of you recently, and I think we talked about this a couple of months ago when we started, have heard about the recent reiteration of the Scopes trial, the intelligent design versus evolution debate, and Steve mentioned the Rastafarians, the people that believe in this flying spaghetti monster, is just as equal a valid theory to the creation of the universe.

I don't subscribe to the intelligent design view. How many of you know what that is, intelligent design view? Intelligent design is too generic for me, because I think that if you believe in the inerrancy of scripture, then you can be more specific than to just say there was an intelligent design.

Wait a minute, don't you think that scripture spells out that these are the things that are spiritually true? I mean, it's not a science textbook, right? Scripture is true, it's not a science textbook. Well, here's the thing. When you deal with science, you deal with The issue is science based on your assumptions that man is true, or is science contingent on what is true based on scripture? What's your foundation and starting point? If we just say scripture is spiritually true, then just leave it at that. But they're not mutually exclusive. What is it? Well, you can be a scientist, who practices scientific theory and blend it with...

He's totally throwing me off here. He's just pushing my buttons. We're doing this, we planned this actually. This is a planned role play where he's going to question me, only I totally got all embarrassed by it. The thing is that as you run into people dealing with the inerrancy of scripture, the creation account is often a very very focal point to the argument because science has said, hey, the Bible can't be true.

It just says God created it in seven days. That doesn't fit with the scientific viewpoint where things happen in a natural progress. What did I say? Seven days, six days, and then a seventh day of rest. I apologize. Speaking of inerrancy, so now that I totally flubbed the role play because I got all distracted and nervous about screwing it up. I screwed it up.

This is going to be an example of inerrancy versus errancy, and I'll do the errancy part. God can be inerrant. Biblical inerrancy requires all of Scripture to be inerrant. This is probably the key point, and it seems like an obvious statement, but there are a lot of people that hold variations on inerrancy that require one to compromise. You can find very easily today in many seminaries ideas that are slightly liberal, that the original autographs, the original texts of scripture were inerrant, but what we have today is not inerrant. So it's just a slight variation. See, the scripture is inerrant, the originals were. We just don't know if what we have now is inerrant. They're saying that the transmission was errant. Or errors may have crept in via man's copying the text errantly.

And then you have things where science contradicts creation, the creation account or something to that. And first of all, I want to clarify in my dad's question there, he said, you know, well, what if it's just a spiritual true and not scientifically true? The thing is that the account and creation radically defies the evolutionary theory order in the sequence that God created the animals. So the two are not compatible. You can't try to intermix them without making a major compromise in either the either saying that scripture is full of error there, and it's not scientifically true, or that you say it's just a figurative passage. And we'll look at why that's problematic as well. In the end, if you say that any part of the Bible is errant, you end up...

Is anyone familiar with this game Jenga? Have you seen Jenga before? What you end up doing is that Down here, which one's the laser button, dad? Is it the top button or the bottom button? Okay. Okay, if you see down here, you have to start pulling pieces out of the puzzle and you start building up these holes here.

Well, if you start down in Genesis and say, hey, Genesis has got some bugs. Sorry, I'm a programmer. Has some errors in it. If you say Genesis has errors in it, starting down here, it's going to tumble and fall and you're going to have a mess. You're going to have a pile of... broken doctrine or theology, because you see, you have a sequence of things where the Old Testament quotes the Old Testament, and the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, and they quote it factually, and that it is not errant, and that it is reliable. So once you start taking things out of the bottom, again, like this down here, you start having holes, and the stability just drops down to nothing because it's like, okay, how do I know what isn't errant if this is errant? When we started and I talked about truth, we talked about the Catholic Church having released various documents now and definitely since then, I think, I had several people point out to me that, thank you, that the whole church does believe that because the Bible is not a science book, that there are some scientific errors in it. Well, you start having some errors in the Bible, where do you draw the line? How do you know what is not errant? If the science is errant, what about the theology? Why can't the theology be errant if the science is errant?

So, let's take a look. My dad talked about the chain, the four points. the steps of how we got the Bible, inspiration, canonization, transmission, and translation. Each step requires the Holy Spirit, requires the intervention of God. Let's ask some questions. I've got them here on the handout.

Who is the only perfect being inside and outside the universe? And the answer to that is easy. It's a gimme. God. God's character is reflected in and by scripture. His intervention is required for the preservation of text. And I've got a list of five points here, but let's just ignore the handout. Don't read it or else you know all the answers. Why does God have to be involved with inspiration? Can anybody give me a...

That's an easy two. That's an easy one. Inspiration is God. Yeah, God is giving the content of the message. The Holy Spirit is involved. So that's an easy one, okay? So we can all agree that it makes sense for the Holy Spirit to have to be part of the inspiration, otherwise we have no inspiration. How about canonization, the compilation of the texts of the Bible? Yeah, without the Holy Spirit, you don't know what's God's ideas and what's man's ideas. Let me ask a slightly different question. Why do we need to, as believers, believe that the Holy Spirit was involved with the canonization? Why would God do that? That's another way to say it. Why would God be involved with the canonization?

Okay, then it's not up to man. But specifically, this is His message to man, and so if He wanted to communicate to man, which it would seem that He does by the fact that He has revealed special revelation to us, He would, by His very nature, have to preserve that in the compilation of the canon.

It's logically a requirement for the Holy Spirit to be able to do it, otherwise we have no certainty. Like my mom said, we don't know what's the difference between man's canon and God's. My dad last week, I believe, mentioned the special anti-Semitic canon of the New Testament that somebody generated several centuries after the Church started. Well, that seems totally contradictory to the fact that Christ was a Jew, but we'll ignore that. The canonization is very critical. How do we know what we know in Scripture is there? Well, the Holy Spirit would have to be involved, logically.

Transmission. This is where it starts getting tricky. Here's the thing that most liberal scholars are just going to dump the idea that the transmission of the scriptures, and here's where it comes into, can withstand man's corruption. There's going to be error brought in transmission. How do we know that this is reliable?

Well, it's the Holy Spirit. If He's gone so far as to inspire and reveal the truth, if He's gone so far as to bring about the canon, the Holy Spirit has to be consistent with the nature and character of God, being perfect, and dealing with things, the Holy Spirit would have to be involved with the transmission, preserving His Word. Real quick... Okay, go ahead, Madeline.

Well, what kind of variations are there? Were you here last week? Yeah, that's, dealing with that issue there, and my dad talked about this a lot, was it last week I believe it was that you talked about this specifically? You were in the nursery, okay.

Well, I can say, he goes into more detail, so if you can get the tape and listen to that, that's good, but I will say that those errors are from more recent, not errors, dangerous, Those differences in the text not being there are from more recent copies and their removal. For example, I think it's Mark, the end of Mark, where there's a section that's missing in some of the newer translations or the NIV marks that the later versions don't have this. They do not remove doctrine and present error. All it says is, okay, we have newer translations where this was omitted.

So it's not... Yes, Art? Sure. Okay, we're going to get there. That's the next one is translation, and I want to talk about that specifically. Okay, here's where we need to be intellectually honest and forthright. But with the transmission, God, through the Holy Spirit, would have to preserve His Word. It is critical that He do that. Now, how many of you remember the beginning of John chapter 1? What does it say, the first verse of John chapter 1? Does anybody remember roughly off the top of your head? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.

So, when we're talking about the truth of God, It's there and then Christ came down, the embodiment of truth came down and communicated it. For God to communicate his truth through the physical embodiment incarnation of Christ and do that and then come and to lose it and inspiration we can agree on, canonization we can agree on, but God can't transmit the truth of his Son and the gospel of salvation and we have to bring in the question, can we know the gospel?

Can we hold on to it? And I think that with transmission, And we're going to look at some A, my theory and supposition as to how things were transferred in just a moment. And then we're going to take a look at why the Bible seems to be consistent with that. But now, looking at transmission, God supernaturally has to preserve his word because of his character. And my dad went over that some. Last week.

But then we look at translation. And here's where it's going to get tricky, because it's easy to say, hey, look, we've got lots of translations. The NIV, some people have problems with. I have a real problem with the Living Translation, or the New Living Translation. That one is so interpretive, it's like, wow. Sometimes it's not even the same verse. So you say, well, there's error in that translation.

Now, that is why as believers, through our walk with the Lord and abiding in the Holy Spirit, we need to pick a translation that is without those problems. Now, there's going to be minor variations, but you can know the meaning and intention of the text that was originally given and inspired by the Holy Spirit, put in the canon by the Holy Spirit, and transmitted and preserved by the Holy Spirit. you can say, listen, this translation is clearly, by doing your homework, this translation is clearly junk. The neutered version of the NIV scares the crud out of me, because I know that there are some children who are getting this, and their parents are going, here's the Bible, and they go, OK, Mom, and they open it up, and it's garbage. So the inerrancy of scripture needs to be preserved, and saints who are abiding need to be involved with that preservation. And that's, I think, part of your question, Marilyn, was like, OK, how do we How did it get transmitted, but then the translations get screwed up as well. And the thing is that how can we read 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, that scripture is useful for our edification to summarize it, and apply it if we believe that the Holy Spirit was unable to preserve the transmission and the translation.

And that's where I think Christians need to be intellectually consistent We can recognize that humans can try to inject those things that are erroneous and fallacious, but we have been given the tools to identify those things and choose to not use those translations and not use those source documents if those are what are being called into question. Oh, the he's are now it kind of things, so things become gender neutral. So that's what neutered is. Yeah. Brief comment. Sure.

I think, you know, if you look at in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, the first 16 verses, a part of the discussion in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, first 16 verses, this is the head covering issue. And, you know, regardless of how you look at the head covering issue, the point that he makes is there's a difference between the male and the female gender. And then you go to 1 Timothy 2, verses 11 through 15. Again, he makes the point there is a gender difference. And so to go back to Scripture and attempt to bleach out the gender difference is contrary to the clear message of Scripture. Thank you. I can see some quizzical looks on your faces. This is definitely not the most popular view.

Pretty commonly now in the church, the idea that the current Bible that we have in English, depending on what translation you pick, or independent of what translation you pick, is full of errors and is unreliable. And my problem with that is that that's intellectually inconsistent with how we apply the Bible if we take it seriously. And so we need to evaluate whether or not the Holy Spirit can be involved with the translation and transmission, and take that much more seriously. I think that it is intellectually dangerous to say that all translations are without error, because we can easily go to verses and passages.

Heck, on Sunday mornings, sometimes here my dad will say, OK, the Greek here really implies this, and the translation comes up short in conveying this. but there's a general conveyance of that truth, it just falls short of conveying all that is in the Greek word. So the translation itself may fall short of conveying everything that's in the Greek word, but the intended meaning is still conveyed, and that's the part where we need to look at that carefully.

If you are going to take 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17 literally. I've got that written down on one of the handout pages here, so I'm going to go ahead and read it early. It's on the fourth page. Every scripture is divinely inspired and profitable for teaching, for conviction, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, fully fitted to every good work. He says every scripture there, so we need to be able to honestly say every scripture and mean it, or we need to be able to scratch that out of our Bibles. It's that serious to me. And so that's why, one, we need to believe that the Holy Spirit is able to preserve His Word and keep it in there, and two, why we need to be diligent about choosing a translation and not just picking anything that says Holy Bible on the front. So this is something to think about and look at, but let's take a look at the... Now I just put my handout out of order. Fortunately there's page numbers on the bottom. Let's take a look at... Oh, that's the back button?

It's not going to do me any good. Let's take a look at a possible way that the scriptures were preserved and why I think it's reasonable to believe they're inerrant. What's one of the arguments that you hear about the Old Testament in particular from people why it's unreliable? What are some of the arguments based on the idea of the earth being billions of years old and humans being around for millions of years? Does anybody know? This is a toughie. I kind of opened it up. Steve? Well, that wasn't what I was going for. Okay, allegories.

What I often hear is that it's mythology or it was passed on word of mouth, mouth-to-mouth communication. How do we know this is reliable? It came down mouth-to-mouth. That assumes, first of all, their assumption is that the universe is millions and billions of years old. if it was a timeline wider than my arms.

But let's take a look at what scripture records instead, and see if that is logically consistent falsehood, Gail. If you have the millions of years or whatever, or thousands even, you're not going to have the overlap of individual persons. You have to speak to the next person that's named or whatever, and so you've got these huge gaps of years where you've got to wonder, Yeah, and that's exactly it. You have a problem here.

I have a timeline that shows the overlap of generations, and this right here I think is one of the critical arguments for the accuracy of the creation account given by God to Adam and then passed down through the generations. If you look at the overlap here, you can see that Adam overlapped with several different people, generation-wise, including people like Methuselah, who lived up until the Flood, and Methuselah, and this is just picking a name out of random, it could have been any of these people, would have talked to Noah, well, not any, but several of the people here you can see overlap, talks to Noah, and Noah is given and communicated to about what took place historically, not to mention living through some of the things that are recorded in Scripture.

So the flood happens, and Noah gets off the ark. He's been given the creation account and the story of the lives of the people up to that point in time. Noah gets on the ark with his son, Shem, in particular, because his name is on the timeline. And Shem gets off the ark with his dad. And Shem actually was really close there.

It is calculated that he was alive still up until the time of Abraham, crossed into the promised land, even though he didn't take full possession of it. So you have from Adam to Shem, maybe two or three generations at most, who are able to clearly communicate the things of the text up to Noah, up to Abraham, and Abraham was alive up until Jacob, for sure, and then Jacob could pass on to Joseph. Now, who was Joseph? Does anybody remember who Joseph was?

They made a movie called What He Was. Steven Spielberg was involved, so it was really a big deal. He was a prince of Egypt. There we go, okay. So Joseph, being a prince of Egypt, having the second most authority in all of the land, right under Pharaoh, brought his dad back into town. Well, not back into town, into town, in Egypt. And as Prince of Egypt, do you think he might have had the authority to say to some scribe, hey, listen, guy who's under me, we're going to have you write down the account of the creation. That's just assuming that it's word of mouth.

If you look at the biblical texts, there is indication that the technology was there for them to have, and there's even some records that indicate that there may have been stone carvings of the creation account and the details that took place, and it's possible that they either got onto the Ark or were made shortly after the Ark, that would still preserve in a written format, even not word-to-word, preserving God's Word up to the point of Joseph. Now, then Israel went into bondage, right? We have lots of bondage in the Bible, where Israel keeps going into bondage, they keep screwing up and getting in trouble, and God brings them back into captivity. This is before that.

So God brings them into bondage there, and then Pharaoh decides he's going to kill all the males under a certain age, and then this guy named Moses, by God's divine hand, gets preserved. And he becomes a what? He made a movie about it, but it wasn't about him. he becomes a prince of Egypt too. So Moses, who is a prince of Egypt, has access to the library that his great-great-great-great, back some generations relative, Joseph, had described.

And remember, this is all theory. I'm just presenting one way this could have happened, because someone will be critical and you need to have at least some kind of answer. Moses comes along and has access to these things and is able to write them down. In fact, in Genesis, It says, these are the records of, in several places, which is part of the way that the stone documents were kept on the side of the slab, it would say, these are the records of. And so it's possible that those are actually literal texts Moses grabbed on the side of the slate and then transcribing what was on there, if not carrying it on perfectly.

I was just thinking that before there were a lot of written records and things were handed down from generation to generation, there still had to be reliability in that transmission. Just think of it in a business standpoint. There was still trading going on and people in different towns who needed to relay messages. You needed to know there was a reliable way to do that. Reliability and trustworthiness was important at the time, culturally. Just by very nature of human beings, when we communicate to people, we want reliability and trustworthiness.

Basically, in short, this is just dealing with the creation account in Genesis, and just Genesis right here. At this point in time, we have the nation of Israel arise, and suddenly, And the technology is definitely there for them to be able to write and make copies of scripture.

But dealing with all of this up to this point of Moses is only one book. It's only Genesis, and it's dealing with a large period of time. And it's a tenable position to think that God could preserve it, and here is one method that he could preserve it with. When you get into the rest of Scripture, who is involved with writing that Scripture in the Old Testament context only? Okay, the prophets. Israel. So it's Israel, it's a subset of people, and it's isolated.

And those people were in mass, and they were making copies and preserving, and my dad went over last week and the weeks before talking about how these things were duplicated and copied and transmitted. And so the transmission is, there is a method that we can see just externally that these things could be preserved. And this may be the way that the Holy Spirit did it. I'm not going to thrust that on scriptures because it's my idea or an idea that I have espoused. But I want to just point out that it is possible for these things to take place and the word to be preserved culturally and historically.

Looking at the Roman times and the New Testament context, how many of you are aware of the mystery religions? My dad's mentioned it some on Sunday mornings. The mystery religions, they're very exclusive. You know, you've got a mystery religion for this people in this town who happen to be left-handed, and a mystery religion for these people, it kind of sounds like the post-modernism thing. You can understand me. But they have their little niche groups, and they have their own mystery. That's why we had the mooses flying across the screen, you know, mysteries.

Well, you couldn't know what that mystery religion believed unless you were lucky enough to be part of their group. Well, when the New Testament comes around with the Gospel, It's a radically different idea. It's like, OK, instead of, we're exclusive, it's like, come here and meet Jesus. Here's the secret. We want to share it with you.

And so all these people who had been living lives going, well, I guess I've got to be part of something so I can appease some god somewhere, and I'll be part of a mystery religion, suddenly were offered something that was inclusive, and it was open, and it was loving, and the mystery was revealed openly and boldly.

So this drew some serious attention, not to mention the Holy Spirit was involved by drawing them in. So as the New Testament epistles were written, they were copied and handed out because it was recognized that this is inspired by God and this is one of the apostles. And so suddenly we have, at the New Testament time, just a great expansion of the number of documents that were there and being handed around. Seriously, because people knew this was New Testament teaching, so they weren't going to just make major mistakes and errors in the copies, they were serious about God's Word, and they transmitted it because of a passion for the truth of the Gospel in their lives.

The mystery religions actually opened up the preservation and expansion of Christianity instead of isolating it. When we think about major world religions, we think about how they're exclusive, and they try to shut each other down, so to speak, In this time in the culture, there was such a hunger for spiritual truth that the other religions actually turned people on to the gospel more likely than turned them off, because it was not inclusive, or because their religion was not inclusive, and Christianity embraced people from various lives. So that is a suppositional theory. It's brief. It's not exhaustive. Yes, Steve?

I'm going to restate that for the recording. Steve pointed out that the volume is what allowed the people in the New Testament time to check the copies, because there were so many copies, they could look at it and say, oh, wait, yours doesn't say the same thing mine does. Let's take a look at it. Let's find another copy and double check it. So the preservation of the texts was possible by volume, in contrast to in the past, very strict copying code.

And I think that's a good point. You know, I think in line with what Steve just said, it is comparable to, you know, we in recent years have this ability to do DNA checking genealogies. Essentially, we have the ability to do the equivalent in the documents that we have in terms of this one is descended from this one and this one is descended from this one and can actually put a genealogical structure to all the copies, thousands of copies that we have. Yeah, I'm going to restate that too.

For just like DNA recording where we can check how DNA got passed through various critters and people, we can do the same thing with scripture and follow lines if there were variations where they came through. And by following the age of the document, guess pretty closely where the source material was. So that is a suppositional look at the scriptures there. I want to then here take a look at reasons internally why scripture needs to be inerrant and why it's plausible that it is inerrant.

We're going to take a look at three different areas or reasons, but these are definitely not exhaustive either. First of all, There's prophecy, secondly quotation and summary, and then also statement of purpose. Prophecy. Where is roughly the first prophecy in all the Bible? Does anybody know? I wrote it down, but I'm just curious if anybody knows off the top of their head. Okay.

Genesis 3.15. Here we go. What does God say to Eve?

That one of her seed would crush Satan's head. Satan would bite his heel. and then he would crush his head. So there's the first prophecy in Scripture. If Scripture is errant, then that prophecy would not come true, possibly. So, starting in Genesis, we deal with God having to fulfill these things in His very character and nature, or else that comes into question, or the fallibility of Scripture comes into comes into play. So we have prophecy being a critical part there for the reliability of things. Another prophecy, I've got here on the second point here, is Moses prophesied in Deuteronomy 18, 15-18, that one who is like him would come. And not only did other prophets, including Joshua, David, Isaiah, and Jeremiah come, but Christ also came, who is much more than Moses. So there's some prophecy and some fulfillment.

In the book of Isaiah 45.1, Isaiah prophesies that King Cyrus, before he was born, would become king. And then later on, historically, it's recorded by sources outside of the Bible that Cyrus became king, and that God says that he would open the gates for King Cyrus, Well, King Cyrus was able to defeat many nations, and one of them in particular was recorded that he actually used his army to divert a river that was the water source and was filling moats and preventing them from getting into the city. They diverted the river and went in through major sieges. So we have external recordings of these things happening outside of Scripture that fulfills these prophecies.

The prophecies of Christ and His death and resurrection are numerous, a cursor reading of the Psalms, and Isaiah 53. That one almost brings me to tears every time I read it. How many of you have read Isaiah 53? If you haven't, please do so. We're going to be going over Isaiah in the main service. My dad will be doing that in the upcoming year. But Isaiah 53 is a very graphic description of what Christ would go through. and then it's proven later on in the New Testament that those things did happen.

So prophecy, and I'm running out of time, so I'm going to cut this short. Prophecy has to come true and be reliable, or else the scripture would be with error. So it's important that we have consistent prophecy. Another thing is quotation and summary, kind of like the jingle blocks I talked about.

If the Old Testament is quoted by other passages in the Old Testament, but the passage it's quoting is errant or in question, you're having to do hermeneutical dances to get around the problem. If I say hermeneutics, does everybody know what that is?

That's Bible interpretation. If your method of interpretation has to become inconsistent to make the Bible consistent, then you have issues. So the Old Testament quoting itself in multiple places would be a problem if what it's quoting is errant. And or the New Testament, when Christ quotes the Old Testament, or any of the authors of the Epistles quotes the Old Testament, if those verses are unreliable, then how do I even believe the New Testament?

When I was teaching a Sunday School class on hermeneutics in Missouri, it was a one-off deal. I was a guest and they asked me to teach. So I did. After the lesson, the guy told me the Old Testament was unreliable and any seminary worth their salt would tell me such.

I thought, well, then the New Testament has to be unreliable because it quotes the Old Testament so thoroughly. I was going to print out a list of all of the Old Testament quotations within the New Testament. There's going to be some really impressive text that is so small you can't read it. So I decided not to put it up there. It wasn't going to be useful for you. And it was going to take a lot of paper, and I felt bad for the Forrest and the Amazons, so I didn't print it out. But the idea is that there's so much quotation of the Old Testament in the New Testament that if the Old Testament is unreliable, then the New Testament is clearly unreliable.

Either that or it becomes figurative like the Old Testament suddenly has become. So as long as you embrace that it's either all errant or all inerrant, you're okay. But if you try to hold any middle ground, you're going to be in all kinds of trouble because you're going to be trying to grab some of this over here and some of that over there and you have no foundation. So quotation and summary and prophecy all point to internal consistencies within scripture. And the last one, and I already went over this a little bit, is statement of purpose.

2 Timothy 3.16-17, and I'll read this again. Every scripture is divinely inspired. We can agree that the autographs are inspired. Can we agree that everything else is preserved and inerrant?

It's profitable for teaching, for conviction, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, fully fitted to every good work." If the scriptures are errant, and there's lots of questionable material in it, I think that you might be able to re-read this as, for every scripture is divinely inspired, and might possibly be profitable for teaching, may convict you, may be slightly corrective, and it might be instructive maybe towards righteousness, we can't tell, and that the man of God might be sort of fulfilled and slightly maybe kind of fitted for doing things that might be good. So, I mean, it kind of gets a little wishy-washy if you don't have, you know, inerrancy, because suddenly all of those things are brought into question. So if the statement of purpose is that those things are true, then I need to be able to read God's Word and find that those things are true. So even the reflection in our lives of God's Word will either prove that this is errant or not, or that we're getting bad teaching.

We could prove that too, but you should be able to check that by the inerrant scriptures. Scripture also records statements like God said, sometimes translations say, thus saith the Lord, and variations on that. I looked up God said in my Bible computer, and that came up 23 times throughout the Bible. Well, if God said something in just the English translation God said, then that says, OK, God said it. The purpose is for God, who is inerrant, to communicate to us something. So the purpose statement of Scripture requires inerrancy and proves it within it.

I have come into, in my own experience, various arguments against the Scriptures and why they're errant and full of mistakes, and I've come up with a list of five things to watch out for. These are certainly not exhaustive, but let's take a look at them real quick. Watch for inconsistent or blatantly poor hermeneutics or misinterpretation that ignores context or misapplies the purpose of the verse. This can show up when something is spoken figuratively but is being applied literally to prove the error of the Bible.

What this often means is that when somebody gets to a verse, they pick it out of context, they take it, they say, ha ha, this says this, and therefore the Bible's wrong, because they're trying to apply it to something externally, outside of the context of what the verse says.

That happened a lot in high school. Fortunately, I didn't run into a lot in college, because by then people were on heavier drugs or something. I'm sorry, that was kind of slanderous. The thing is that those kinds of things were much more common when I was younger, and then I kind of got away from talking to those same sort of people, so I run into it less.

But you'll run into that where people will take a verse, they'll take it out of context, and then say, Ha! See, the Bible's wrong. That means that we need to know God's Word well enough to know the context for these things. Or if anybody decides they want to quote a Bible, this is always a real clincher. Make sure that you have one there that you can read. Either you have one with you, but if they're there, and you're there, and there's no Bible, don't just take it on face value ever. See what the Bible says.

Otherwise, it's easy for somebody to misquote it, especially if they're trying to disprove it. So that's one of the things. Look for presuppositions that are rooted before the text is even open. Some people have biases or presuppositions that they come to the text with first, and that influences their interpretation very obviously often. because they're already going to say, this is my theory, and then they're going to bend scripture around proving that. So watch out for those things.

The Bible is wrong because there's a bunch of stories that were passed down by word of mouth for thousands and thousands of years, or millions and millions. This assumes something that is not a fact. They cannot prove that the universe is millions or billions or trillions or any number of years old. They cannot prove that absolutely, and that's their presupposition. So when they go to the text, then they're going to try to force that on the text. Look for assumptions that falsely preclude one thing over another.

For example, sometimes people will talk about the variations of the genealogy of Christ. Matthew records a genealogy and so does Luke. They go through different family lines. One deals with Joseph's line and one deals with Mary's line. And they say, see, they're not the same people. Ha ha ha. It's like, no, because one goes through Joseph and one goes through Mary.

They're already going to go to the text and look for something that's out of context again, but particularly when they do comparison like that, make sure that they're being intellectually honest and looking at the facts around it. Another one is anthropomorphisms, like God changing his mind, should not be taken as serious threats because mankind's finite language falls short in conveying the perfection and action of an infinite God.

How many of you have ever had anybody oppose it? Well, see, God changed his mind. I don't run into that very often because most people don't read the Bible, so they don't know that that's part of the problem. They don't know the Bible, and they make these assertions about it, and it's like, okay.

But when you're dealing with an infinite God, when He interacts with finite people, we have expressions that that force God's actions to be described in human ways, which is guaranteed to be a problem in the language of humans. It doesn't reflect error in the scripture, it reflects the nature of human language. And I think that's a critical point to realize. And I had this earlier, but I didn't point it out.

The Bible has lies in it. There are recorded words of Satan. So, it's not that the Bible is full of deception and errors, other than there are places where error is recorded to be documented accurately. So, any time somebody comes up with an anthropomorphism, or they try to make a statement that the Bible has lies in it, you can say, I agree. When Satan said those things to Christ, and Christ has a quote, Deuteronomy, which by the way is an internal reference, It's pretty critical to Jews.

Steve? I was just going to say that these type of objections, people who are at that point raising those objections, they're already, their hearts are already against Scripture. They're already enemies of Scripture. For us to give a defense or to hope in us, the more general thing we're going to get from the men on the street is just, well, Scripture is full of all sorts of contradictions, but they won't be able to name a single one of them.

I want to restate this for the recording that I'm just restating this for the recording. Steve's point was that most people, when they come into these arguments, their heart is already hardened and they're not interested in actually discussing this in its context. Their minds are already made up. And my dad's point after that was that that shouldn't prevent us from talking to those people, but it is definitely one of those things where their minds are made up and it's probably not going to be a fruitful argument that leads to anything. I've run into that in so many situations in life It's outside of theology. Humans like to argue just because they like to be right, and they don't care what the facts say. So anyways, that's an issue.

Verse 5, or verse 5, the Gospel of Randy, point 5, a reliance on finite math to combat the triune nature of God. This is a classic argument and really conveys a lack of understanding of how God is described in the Bible and not an understanding of the paradox of the Trinity. Mathematics, you've heard that, well, there's three parts of God and there's only one God. How does that work?

I got that in college a couple of times. The problem is that you're trying to define an infinite God in finite terms, and that right by itself, again, like the God changing his mind with the anthropomorphisms, becomes problematic. It wasn't me. I don't know what that was.

When you come into the argument of the Trinity, it's one of those things where they like to go for that and say, oh, it's mathematically impossible. You could, if you're feeling nasty, ask them about the system of mathematics and how much they put faith in it and see how it's a closed system and all kinds of other things, but most people don't want to deal with that and I really wouldn't encourage you to try to deconstruct mathematics. It's not going to be very fruitful for anyone, but mathematics is a closed system and it's not 100% self-contained, without flaw. Russell, last century, spent a long time trying to apply mathematical laws to philosophy, and by the time he was done, he decided that it just couldn't be done, because at some point in time, to try to fix one, prop up something over here, he ended up contradicting this happening over here, even in mathematics. And Kurt Codell, also said that there's a lot of suppositions in mathematics.

How do you know that one is one? You assume one is one, and things like that. So anyways, that's philosophical. It may be kind of a waste of time, so you'll want to be careful who you argue the Trinity over with and how much time you want to go into the philosophy. Basically, it's an element of faith that God is describing himself accurately. So anyways, those are addressing claims of error and possibly some things to think about. So there was my possibly small version of looking at heresy. Any questions? I'm sure there's plenty of those. We're out of time almost, but I want to give you a chance to ask questions or at least contradict me.

Okay, we don't want to raise our hand fast enough, so I'm going to go ahead and close in prayer and we can talk about it afterwards if you have questions. Heavenly Father, we come before you and we thank you for your word. We thank you that it is preserved by your work And we thank you for your love and your work in our lives. We lift up the day to you and praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.