The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, Lesson 36 continued
Mike Doyle · Nov 13, 2022
Holy Spirit (2021-23), No. 87
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261929142064

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay We are chapter 36 Less than 36 and we're not speeding through this very fast, but We're in question 5 and really kind of what we've been talking about is some of the aspects of the scriptures and Do the scriptures contain the Word of God plus other matters also and we decided yeah, it gives us a some other things.

We discovered, we talked last week that scripture can't be broken. You can't say, well, throw a piece of it out or a piece of it in or add something to it. That it's complete and accurate in the way that it was put together by the Holy Spirit. And now we got talking at the end of last week, why are the most obscure incidentals of the Word of God so important? And we said that, Riteout said, how all this accords with our theme, the literal interpretation by the Holy Spirit, he presented overall.

Those might be called incidentals and in no way necessary for the general accuracy of scripture, but you'll find that there are no such things as incidentals in God's Word. I like that because there really isn't. There aren't any incidentals. I call them fillers. If you read a lot of authors, especially Christian authors, what they have to say they can say in 20 pages, but they've got to fill up 140. A hundred of what they write are filler. The scripture doesn't have fillers.

It's precise. Today, the first question we're going to talk about is number five. It says, can scripture be accurate if it relates to lies that have been told? It's a pretty interesting question that Rideout asks because if you go to Genesis, right away you see Lucifer lying to Eve. So the question is, is scripture accurate there? The answer is sure it is.

Just because you're sinning doesn't mean... Scripture isn't developed by God to only show the good parts. One of the great things about it is that He shows the foibles and the weaknesses of all those disciples in the Gospels and through all of these patriarchs in the Old Testament. When they sin, they sin. When they lied, they lied. When they were deceptive, when they were devious, all of that shows up.

But it may be objected that there is in scripture very much that is not true. And how can that be inspired? That's what triggered my question. Undoubtedly we have, for instance, the falsities of Satan. His temptation of the Lord, his temptation of Eve, his misquoting scripture. Didn't he misquote things to Eve? Didn't he misquote things to the Lord Jesus?

Sure he does. He does it all the time. He's a deceiver. But it's there. But then, says the objector, what becomes of your theory of verbal inspiration? Do you see a problem there or is this a made-up problem? The mistake is in confounding infallible inspiration with the contents of what is revealed.

To illustrate, a man might be a perfectly accurate reporter, able to take down every word of an address. It'd be a great mistake to confound his report of the address with the contents of the address. You understand what he means there? If somebody gives me a copy of the teleprompter for Joe Biden's speech, am I going to take it down accurately? I've already got it. It's accurate. So can I misconstrue what he said? with the infallibility of my recording. There's a difference. Okay? You know, Mike, that just reminded me of a thought.

You know, anytime I've read a newspaper article about something that I was involved in or intimately aware of, I catch errors and mistakes all throughout the article. It's like, well, that's not what happened, that's not what he said, and so on and so forth. Like, full of it. And then I turn around and read all the other articles in newspapers that are exactly accurate. But, you know, God's Word doesn't have any of that, right? It doesn't have those little errors in detail. Yeah.

I was interviewed one time for an article and the guy that was interviewing me, the writer of the article, he kept re-asking the same question over and over again because he was trying to get the answer he wanted. And I didn't give him the answer he wanted, but when the article showed up, it looked like I gave him the answer he wanted. That's weird.

Okay, so the point being that the reports of events in the scripture don't have anything to do with whether it's inspired or not. you know, the accuracy of what happened and what was said, and even if the information is misconstrued, it's like all of the, what Paul calls super-apostles in 2nd Corinthians, what did they have to say?

Well, they were deceptive in everything they were doing. Does it make scripture errant? Have errors in it if somebody like that is preaching a false gospel? No, it doesn't. It shows that the false gospel in and of itself did happen. It was preached. People fell for it and followed it. We have a tendency sometimes to look at scriptures from a mercy standpoint, that everything's going to work out in the end. It's Hollywood. It's not. So that leads to the next question, which is probably a more profound question.

Did God protect his word when it was hand copied? So historically, you know, there wasn't scanning machines and computers, so God's word was hand copied for centuries, mostly by monks. whether they were believers or not. Did God protect the veracity of his word through all of those copies? Yes. No mistakes. No opinion.

If you're like me, I read a lot of 1850 to 1900 English because I like Brethren writers. Well, their meaning for a lot of words is different than our meaning today. And so sometimes it's a good thing that word search has this synonym thing in it, because I can look and say, oh, that's what that word means. That's what he means. I would have thought it was something else. So there are incidences in Scripture where it looks like a copy made at this point has been modified by someone later, at a later time, because of language, because of translations into different languages.

Like what was the original? The original Word of God was written in Greek, right? But as the Catholics took control of scripture translation, a lot of it got translated into Latin. And so they did Latin because they thought Latin was a dead language and it wouldn't change over time. Like our English changes constantly because it's a live language, we use it all the time. Well, Latin stopped being used. And so they thought, well, at least the Catholics thought, that if they got everything translated into Latin, it would mean the same thing because it wasn't going to change through usage. So what do you think?

Is God's word, did he protect it by these guys that painstakingly wrote these beautiful characters and letters? They were so careful because someone had the guidance of the Holy Spirit. So I wasn't interested in him being incorrect. He was a governing agent in seeing what it was. And these were people who were very diligent about being careful. And they may have been sick, but they had to take a little time to do it all over again. Yeah, they did.

And if you think about the different translations, no major doctrine is ever compromised in the translations of the Bible. Yeah. There may be little words or little... You think that transcribers were all believers? I think, no, I think very few of them were. They were.

Sure. Sure. Sure. That's really important. You mentioned governing agent and also supervision, and I think that, somebody pop in there. You have different personalities, you have different people all throughout history that were involved in copying, scribing the Word of God, but without that governing agent of the Holy Spirit, whether they're believers or not, His person, through the Holy Spirit, is preserving His Word. And that's a divine thing. Yeah, I think so too. I think so too. I don't think... Is there any kind of literature that falls under that supervision?

What I'm looking for is something I was looking at this week, out of John, I think it's 12. It might have been 11. where the Jews wanted to, you know, because he raised Lazarus from the dead, that was the last straw. We got to get rid of him. And Annas, who was the high priest, said, isn't it better that one man die for the whole, for all of Israel, than have all of Israel be smushed down by the Romans, prophetic, by a guy who had no idea. I mean, a Jewish rabbi, Maybe the high priest, and I think he was, makes this prophetic statement, you know, without any understanding of what he's really saying, you know. Well, I think this is actually a big deal today. It's always been a big deal. It is. Right.

You're going to have hope in something. the authenticity of God's word, did God really say it? I don't think so, because I know better than anyone. That happened in the garden and that continues to happen today, but this is a fundamental question for people that are coming to terms with God's word is, is this what God said, or is this just what Paul said? Right?

Or Mark, or Luke, or John, or whomever. It seems like this should be a literary class, and it's not important to our spirituality, but it absolutely is, because if you don't trust that the Word of God has been preserved and governed by the Holy Spirit to say exactly what He intended to say to you in His love letter, then you don't have a basis. You go to another authority. Yes, you do. You do a great swap, right? Like, God said, look, I think this is a better authority. I'm going to choose whatever. Or, I think this is what he meant. Yeah, I think this is what he really meant.

Yeah, my anecdotal experience about that was, I was a Christian about two and a half weeks in December, coming out of a Catholic background. Not that I'd ever been in a Catholic church in the previous 15 years, but I thought, oh, well, I'm a Christian. I better go to Mass on Sunday, or on Christmas Day. So I did.

They read the gospel account of the birth of Christ. And for the first time in my life, I really heard what it was saying. And I could hardly contain myself in how wonderful it was. And then some priest got up and talked for 20 minutes and he had not a clue. I got up and walked out of the church. Because all this time, I realized all this time, I never saw. And I think that's true with especially young believers or those that the Lord is leading. It puts a burden on us to be careful with what we say. And what I've found over the years is that my opinion and your opinion doesn't count.

The words have the power. And if you get to the words and can stay with the words, they'll do the work. They will do the work. And he tells us that in several places, you know. When the rubber meets the road, so to speak, for us it's, did God really say this? And we talk about how that applies to our identification a lot.

You have to take God at his word. Trust that that original language, that manuscript, and all the comparisons of all the scrolls that we're going to continue to find, how they match up. Me too is that one decision of, did God really say this and is this true?

And that's where interpretation and the method of interpretation that you use can really take you off the rails. I've seen so many... I think you're right about that. I think that's the danger. They're well-intended, they're academic, they're scholarly, they love the Lord, but they adopt...

Do I really say or do I need to add my system to this thing? Because there's a really good system going on over here where it would just make everything seem to make sense I be in a better place by believing what he said versus trying to reinterpret it to make it fit my system. And that's what people are dealing with. Let me ask a question right there because it's critical.

There are two basic forms with adjustments that are in play today. There's a reformed viewpoint of God's Word and then there's a dispensational viewpoint. Or put it another way, there's a law view or the grace view. So people that grow up in a law-based church, they're instructed that way and then they get to be adults.

I don't know if they ever question what they disregard. They think grace is scary. Or the rare bird that grows up in a grace environment rejects the law viewpoint, but both groups preach salvation by grace. They both do. But living the Christian life, you either live it by law, adherence to as much or as little of the law as you've been taught, or you learn how grace functions and you operate that way. That to me is the biggest problem in Christianity, law and grace. Grace isn't taught very much, it certainly isn't understood very much in terms of You can define it, you can put a nice definition on what grace is, but then you try to, in the scriptures, I think it's difficult to read the scriptures when you get to imperative verses that say, you know, like Romans 12, I beseech you by the mercies of God, present your body a living sacrifice. I'm supposed to do that. Oh, wasn't that legal? That's right. Confess your sins. You know, all the things that Vern used to love to call logical imperatives.

Under grace, Paul writes and lays out a position that we have based on grace. And then he says, based on all of that, here's what that life looks like. This is how it should function. Well, that same premise was true when God gave the law to Moses. He said, you're my people, special set-aside people.

And based on everything I've done for you, let me give you the rules on how this life works, not rules in the sense of You've got to try as hard, but how does a righteous man under the law live? And you need to do these things. Well, of course, what did man do with sin in his head? He went from back here to obey the law, to be righteous, where God was saying, no, you start with righteousness and work that way. A lot of times, folks, I think, they either grab on to one or the other and they become a darb. A darby is 100 percent. It's like everything here. I'm a darby guy. I'm a darby. I'm a partner. I'm everything here.

But what I see practically happening in my own life, and because of my journey, is salvation is by faith. It's through grace. And right after that moment, I've got to get busy. And so what I do is I take grace and I apply it to my salvation, but I don't take the same exact grace and understand it through my spiritual growth. I have to get busy now. And the church does a really good job of telling me how to do that. I don't have an opportunity to learn what it means to be a believer in the grace, because that's salvation, that's done, that happened when I was baptized. Right. So faith works the same way after salvation. It still exists in a reality of grace.

That's unparadoxical. So now you've got to get busy. You've got to shuffle in a few somehow. Yeah. So it puts a lot of emphasis on the gospel message being a grace message. That's where it stops, though, for most people. I agree. I agree. Because your life is a grace message, too.

Sure, but if the gospel message you heard had law mixed into it, then you really don't. But our discussion over the last five minutes discounts the work of the Spirit in every individual believer. And I think he's very proactive in terms of wanting to teach and trying to teach every believer grace and how it works. And it's so opposed by the sin nature and all of the enemies of grace that you don't see it anywhere except in God's Word. That's where you see it. And maybe you see it playing out in action and in a believer's life, but most of the time, where you see it as God's word, you think, wow, God didn't have to do that, but he did it.

It's kind of a cool place to be in the underground, where you think to yourself, well, I wouldn't have done it that way. No, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have done it that way. No. That's actually a really, you can't even think of one correct, because the moment you realize that you wouldn't have done it that way, That's why. That's why. Right. Yeah, I thought that same thought that if we took these ten people in the room and we're going to decide about how salvation is going to work, we're going to make up the plan. There would be no grace in the plan. None. Because you have to be a sovereign God to be gracious. You have to be. You know? So, anyway.

So in terms of hand copies, I think, and I know growing up in Catholicism, they made a big deal out of these guys that sat in these monasteries with a little feather pen and meticulously drew every one of those letters and the letters are huge and the Bibles are this thick. What I think is cool about it now is that they're discovering, who was it, Courtney was talking about, you see Josh McDowell speak, and everything they're finding of antiquity that has to do with the Word of God verifies the Word of God today, and the graciousness of it. I will say two things about grace. One is, as Lois Perry Chaffer said, grace is the most hated thing in the world, and I think it is.

There's no question about it because it eliminates you. You know, you don't get to say to God, I got this. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it. Grace doesn't work that way. He's going to do everything. You've got to let him. And the other thing about grace is that all the credit goes somewhere else. Except to you. And that's hard because we all want a little credit. No matter what it is. I hold the door open for you. I appreciate the fact that you said thank you. Makes me feel good. That was my credit.

So these transcribers of scripture, it would be inconsistent with God not to protect His Word. It would be totally inconsistent with his character. Yet you look around and you think, well, how did he allow all these false religions to sprout up and really fool billions of people? And Lord Jesus announced that the Spirit of God convicts the world of sin, of righteousness.

In observing, I don't see it. You see that? Like the nation of Islam. You think the Spirit of God is over there convincing them about who Christ is? He says he is. No. As soon as I adopt that kind of a viewpoint, I begin to judge God. You see that? Whenever I question him, I'm the judge, rather than he being sovereign and I'm the one who receives. I've never thought about it until now, but are all these false religions attributed to Satan? Sure they are. Sure they are.

They're all part of his, he's the god of this world we're living in, and he does everything he can to discount God. Well, and you know, it's pretty basic. The great thing about understanding Satan, not that I suggest you study him, But he's, in 7,000 years, he hasn't changed his game plan. What Dr. Morris called the long war against God. That's right. And so he, every false religion has basically the same premise.

You must die for your God. Christianity is the only one where God died for you. You know, you've got to perform. Otherwise, you know, you don't get the 70 year old virgin. or however that goes. And it's true within the confines of Christendom. Catholicism is totally law-based, based on everything that I must do, otherwise I am not going to make it. Reformed theology with their doctrine of perseverance of the saints, it's the same thing. I don't have security until I actually get across the finish line. where the grace-based, you should have the security right now, based on what he says in his word.

And that has never changed. No matter how much the opposition there is to the grace message, We all have needs. Every single one of us. Sure we do. Maybe we just need a little bit more and a little bit more in order to cross that finish line. Maybe you need a little bit more. You spend the rest of your life thinking about what you need as opposed to what I have in Christ already. It's a different perspective.

You know that 2 Corinthians, thorn in the flesh verses say exactly that. Paul goes to the third heaven and he finds out what he has. He comes back and God gives him a thorn in the flesh so that he wouldn't think of himself any higher than he should. And he goes to God twice because he has a need. But God's grace overwhelms him so much that his need became secondary to the manifestation of God's grace. That's the cool thing. And we don't think grace is...

I need you to do anything. I need you to spend time knowing what you have in me. Yeah. And that's all you, really, we're praying for those kids that you mentioned. That's what they need. They need to know that this Savior is not an icon and not a guy in a corner. He's real, he's God, and he loves you, and he gave his life for you, and he wants you to know him. And he fulfills, he's a fulfillment of every desire you ever had. You know, hard message to get across. Okay, I got one minute, we're going to get through this last question.

According to the author, what is higher criticism? Higher criticism, he says, the purpose of higher criticism is to judge the text by its context, contents, and to accept or reject it according to certain standards adopted by critics. The way it looks is you go to college, they deconstruct the Bible according to their own standards, they reinterpret it, and then they tell you what to believe. That's higher criticism.

That's exactly right. Somebody in here said that the problem with seminaries is that they go to school two, three, four years, and they like to sit around and debate, so they artificially come up with the other side of the argument, and then they sit around and argue.

That's right. I know. I know. You don't come to a conclusion. That's part of my experience. But that's the whole point. You don't come to a conclusion. And then you have some fool in the background say, well, you're entitled to your belief and I'm entitled to mine. No, we're not. That's right. Yeah.

So, and it really does get to the point of, can you trust God's Word? Well, salvation really is trusting what the Father says about the Son, isn't it? The Christian life is really based on trusting what God's Word says about the Lord Jesus Christ. That's really what it is.

So I either believe the person who said it, or I don't. And if I'm focusing somewhere other than the person, I'm going to get fooled. Not that the words aren't important, they're extremely important, but the words are designed to reveal a person to me, and that's where the trust is. It's in him.

I laugh all the time. I've got a brother who has... sometimes he's funny, sometimes he isn't. But he loves to say, have I lied to you lately? And I always think about the Word of God. Has it lied to me lately? No, it never has. It never has. My brother has.

Anyway, let's close. Father Howard, thank you for your grace. We desire to grow in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus, Him personally, so that we would be able to rest and trust Him for every circumstance that comes our way. And we thank you for Him, and we pray in His precious name. Amen.