Well, it's 7 o'clock, so we're going to get started. And before we have a word of prayer, I want to read a poem for you. You can read it with me, all right, or listen as we read it. It's a tale of two sisters. With hearts so kind and gentle and sympathetic eye, with touching deep affection and loyal tender tie, was love betrothed to doctrine. to hold him all her days, and walk the aisles of gladness, united in his ways. Her younger sister also had qualities as fair, of caring, selfless kindness, and warmth without compare. Thus Unity was drawn to the husband of her youth, and pledged herself forever to be the Bride of Truth. But Time, would bitter envy across the testing years, pursued the slow erosion of happiness to tears, till Love began to weary of Doctrine's pleasant voice, and Unity grew code to the partner of her choice. The love began to notice the charms of heresy, and awed by his opinions, she wanted to be free. And unity perceived that her virtues were desired by many, many others whose ways she so admired. At length, two precious unions, so promising, so blessed, were darkened by delusion, disloyalty, unrest, till it came the day of sorrows and rending vows of youth when love divorced her doctrine and unity her truth. What's that all about? Well, where are the two marriages? Love and doctrine are always married together, and they made a wonderful couple. And unity and truth were a wonderful couple. Well, what happened? According to the poem, love began to notice the charms of heresy and unity perceived her virtue were desired by many others until ultimately they were divorced. Love divorced her doctrine and unity or truth. What's it, the author trying to say? What has happened in history, church history? Love and doctrine, are they separate? They should be a married couple walking happily together. Yet somehow we see that as it's either one or the other or I have so much love that I can overlook your doctrine or whatever. What else? We want to be united to everybody, no matter what your true system or belief system. We want to love anything and everything and everybody and whatever. And so that's a tale of two sisters. And that's a poem that maybe will help us to realize that There is an issue about this thing called doctrine and truth. And whether it's important or not, we're going to talk about that tonight a little bit. And that's going to be this Bible Institute's lessons are on doctrine, basic Bible doctrines. This first series of five weeks is on three of them. Then we're going to go have a little break and go to three more and then have another break and maybe next fall or whenever do the last three. But we want to just being started with that. But as we begin, let's just take a time to have a word of prayer. And we're thankful for all of your presence here. Let's just have a time of prayer. Father, we want your spirit to guide and direct as we study tonight the doctrines of the Bible about yourself and about your son. But more importantly, Father, we just want to know the truth of your word. And we want to have that wonderful marriage between love and doctrine and unity and truth. We want to be a people who have not divorced ourselves from either one, but have lived and are living and will live very close to the truth that you've communicated to us. Well, thank you for that. Thank you for each one here. Thank you for their safety. If there's others who have or are coming and are facing some difficult roads, we pray that you give them wisdom and protection. And we'll thank you for that in Christ's name. Amen. So let's go to your your sheets which have notes on it. And the first one was what is expected and that was a syllabus. We're going to go right on down that and see if we can cover some things. First of all, what is doctrine? What is theology? What is this subject that we are? And you say, well, everybody knows what that is. But you'd be surprised how many people came to me when it was advertised in a bulletin and said, what's doctrine? And I realized that some words that I know the definition of, I assume everybody in the world knows the definition of. Well, once I was a young Christian, and I didn't know the definition of doctrine either. If you said, what's doctrine, I wouldn't have been able to define it. Or theology, I wouldn't have been able to define it. So it is not an embarrassment to not know something. It's an embarrassment when you don't know and you pretend you do. That's what's embarrassing. So maybe you don't know what it is. So we want to just define it. In general, the word doctrine means teaching. Absolutely. Somebody said it over here. In Mark chapter 7, verse 7, which we studied Sunday night in our evening service, he said, you take the teachings as doctrine. And when you look up in the Greeks, those are the same words, the teaching as teachings. All right. The word doctrine is from the Latin word doctrina, which means instruction, education, learning. In other words, that which is taught, that which is You've been taught and therefore you hold. It is the truth that is being presented in a given situation. So doctrine is the teaching, the instruction, that which is being held by you or whoever, a group, a church, whatever it might be. So doctrine is teaching, basically, and that which is held. Theology, by the way, biblical doctrine is divine truths that are recorded in scripture and intended by God to be taught. So there's doctrine on how to build bridges and there's doctrine on whatever. That's the teaching on bridge building and whatever. Biblical doctrine, those divine truths that are recorded in God's word and intended by God to be taught. So it's just truth intended to be taught or that kind of a thing. And now let's go to the word theology. If you were here Sunday night, you got a quick overview of that. What's theology? Pardon me? The study of God. You have two words, obviously. Just like in biology, all these other subjects, a lot of subjects, it's ology at the end of it. And so theology has two words in it. Theos, which means God. It's a Greek word, God. Logos, from which you get ology. Logos is the word that's found in John 1, verse 1. In the beginning was the Logos. The Logos was with God. The word Logos means revelation. or teaching in that sense, or the study of, if you would, it can jump over to that. And for us, what we are revelation or teaching, that kind of thing. When you realize what the Greeks understood that to be in John chapter one, when Christ, when John said Christ about Christ, he was the Logos. The Greeks came to understand the word Logos and Philo does a great job of helping us understand it. It means, something that has been established as solid truth, or the revelation of the communication of the words that are solid truth. And there were two schools of thought in the Greek world, just as there are two schools of thought in the world of America today. One was that solid truth, that revelation of solid truth, came through rational thinking. And so some of the philosophers in Greek said, you know, the way you get logos, the way you get the revelation of solid truth is through rational, we might call it scientific thinking. Man on his own studies something and comes to realize there's this or that or the other thing, gravity, whatever it might be. So it could come through rational thinking. But there was another group of philosophers in Greek who said that that communication or revelation of that word, if you would. That's why it's translated word in John chapter one. That word, that expression, that communication, that revelation came not from rational thinking of men, but from revelation of gods. For the Greeks, obviously, there were many gods. And so they were looking for logos. They were looking for words. They were looking for revelation or communication from the gods. And then John says in the beginning was the logos, the revelation of truth. And in that Logos, the word was with God, the word was God. So theology means God plus the word or revelation or study of, we could ultimately say. So theology is the revelation of God, or the word of God, or the study of God, if you would. Now, there are several different types of theology, and you will find that. For example, these in here, it says right on here, systematic theology. In other words, it's the revelation of God, which is God's word for us who believe in inspiration and everything. This is the revelation of God, the revelation of God seen in a systematic way. And basically what we're going to do is a systematic theology. So we're going to take it and look at the Bible, look at all the verses in the Bible that talk about the Bible. Then we're going to talk about God, look at all the verses in the Bible that talk about God. Then we're going to look at Christ, all the verses in the Bible that talk about Christ or the Spirit or whatever it is. So it's the revelation of God, this revelation, systematized. So you start with this book and you end up with either Thiessen's book, Erechson's book, or six volumes of Schaeffer, or whatever it might be, where man has systematized the revelation that God has given to us and put it in a nice neat package. You say, well, we shouldn't do that. But you kind of have to do that. What does the Bible say about Satan? Well, it doesn't say it in one chapter, does it? It doesn't say it in one book. You know, if you're going to understand what the Bible says about Satan, you're going to have to read Genesis a little bit because there's something about Satan in Genesis. And, you know, Isaiah has some things and on and on it goes. Revelation has some things. So you've got to look at a whole bunch of different verses and a whole bunch of different places in the Bible. And you put them all together and then you say, this is what the Bible teaches about Satan. Well, what does the Bible teach about Christ? Well, there's not one chapter of one book that says this is everything you need to know about Christ. It's scattered from start to finish, et cetera, et cetera. So there are different types of theology. There's systematic theology. There is another one called dogmatic theology. Dogmatic would mean what? Anybody hear dogmatic? What does that mean? Rigid beliefs. Exactly. So typically, if you see something that's not called systematic, but it's called dogmatic theology, it would be Lutheran. Dogmatic Lutheran theology. This is what us Lutherans believe. Or dogmatic Catholic theology. That's what Catholics believe. We don't care what the Bible says. We, you know, that kind of an attitude. Or there is dogmatic Baptist belief, theology, right? So it's theology, God's revelation presented in a dogmatic fashion. This is what we believe, all right? And there's some legitimacy to that. But obviously each of these are man's attempt to take God's revelation and systematize it or dogmatize it. And as good as that is, we have men doing that. So you've got to kind of be careful reading any of these books. They're not inspired, all right? But they do a good job. Even rivalry would be systematic. Another one would be critical theology. The liberals love that. They look at God's revelation critically. They love to just critique it and figure out, you know, Isaiah, we know that Isaiah didn't write Isaiah. You knew that, didn't you? I mean, you have to know that. Any idiot would know that, right? In fact, it was written by how many guys? Had to be written by at least two guys because some of it couldn't have happened in Isaiah's time and, you know, whatever. So they critique it all. And so they call that critical theology, looking at God's revelation in a critical way. And that doesn't necessarily, a lot of times we look at things critically, that doesn't mean we're always bad, but it does mean in this case they are bad. Another one is called biblical theology. There's a pain of a new thought. What would biblical theology be? God's revelation looked at systematically, God's revelation looked at dogmatically, God's revelation looked at in a critical light. What would be biblical theology? You're looking at it biblically. There's the pain of a new thought. And it's one of the theologies that you would think would be very popular. And you very, very seldom are taught biblical theology. And I'll never forget when finally in seminary, they introduced us to biblical theology. I said, what did you spend all this time on systematic theology for? I like this, you know. And it's anything. You can have all kinds of different words in front of the word theology. And it just means God's revelation looked at systematically, dogmatically, biblically, whatever it is. OK. Those are the different types. There are aberrant theologies. What does aberrant mean? I don't know what it means. That's why I need to ask you guys. What does it mean? All right. False theology. I'll just give you some. Very popular is Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, and Black Theology. Those are three very prominent. If you go to the Divinity School in Rochester, they are the promoters of these three more than anything else. Liberation Theology, which is a South American kind of a thing more than anything else, but also was found in America in the form of Feminist or Black. They're all kind of related. They say that as you look at God's revelation, what it really teaches is liberation. We've got to be free people. So, you know, all of us oppressed people, we've got to, and it was used in South America in particular to throw off all the dictators and to rebel against the government. Black theology was the foundation, the spiritual foundation for the movement in the 60s and so to throw off oppression within the black community and feminist theology says that women are to be free, that kind of a thing. So there are some who kind of misuse it. This one in particular. In 1981, one of America's activist evangelical theologians wrote that liberation theologies were the most significant theological development of the decade. It's interesting that they see this as a very significant evangelical theologian. Black, feminist, Latin American, or liberation theology attempt to fundamentally rethink God's revelation. from the standpoint of the oppressed. So as you read through the Bible, everything's read through the eyes of I'm an oppressed person and this isn't fair and I got to throw it off. So I have to break from feminism or whatever it is. So those are some aberrant ones. There are many, many, many out there. And so that'll help you. Do you understand doctrine is? Teaching and theology is God's revelation or God's study, God's communication, God's revelation, and it can be looked in different ways. So that's that's very important for all of us. Any comments on that? Just remember, in some ways, and I do it all the time, you do it all the time, it is picking out all the verses and rearranging them instead of studying Genesis 1-1 and going to Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 and studying it that way. You say, I'm going to look at the whole concept of Satan in the Bible. or sin in the Bible, or salvation in the Bible. And so I'm going to pick the verse from Romans, I'm going to pick some from Galatians, I'm going to pick from here, and I'm going to put them all on a piece of paper and then say, this is what the Bible teaches about that. And we need to do that. All right. That's how we often have to think. However, just remember when we do that, as with all these books and any books that are written by man, it is man's attempt. And that's why when you read Thiessen or Erickson or Schaeffer, they'll all basically be the same. These are all conservative people, but they'll still be different. because they're men trying to rearrange God's truth into a system that fits their mindset and whatever. So there's always a little danger there unless they happen to be a perfect person. And I haven't happened to meet one of those yet. OK, so don't be afraid of it. OK, any comments? What are the areas of doctrine or theology? Well, bibliology is the doctrine of the Bible. Theology proper is the doctrine of God. We often call theology proper, so we're just going to talk about God. Christology, the doctrine of Christ. Pneumatology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Pneumatos, Holy Spirit. These are all obviously kind of Greek words rewritten in English. Angeology means angels. Anthropology, man. Amartyology, that's sin. Armatos is sin. Soteriology is the doctrine of salvation. Ecclesiology is the doctrine of the church. And eschatology is the study of last times. Eschatos means last times. Now, when you think about it, what's most important? Well, I don't know that there is a most important, but what's foundational? Well, most people would say if you take away a correct view of bibliology, the Bible, And there are many people in our world who don't have a correct view, in my opinion, in my understanding of scripture, don't have a correct view of the Bible. They don't believe in inspiration. They don't believe in inerrancy and all those kinds of things. If you take that away, then all the rest crumble. You know, this is the foundation. So we're going to start with bibliology. What does the Bible say about itself? Because once we get that established, then we can build on that and have a confidence to figure out what it says about God or Christ or the Holy Spirit, which seems to be next in importance. And once we can do that, we also have to understand man and sin. And now that we understand God, the Spirit, Christ, man and sin, we're saying, oh, boy, you know, now what do I do? So I need a study of the salvation. The church is the way things are done right now and ultimately last times. For whatever reason, you will find that most theologies are broken up into those 10 areas. Why there are not 11 or 12 or 6 or 5? I don't know. Other than Schaefer wrote the first books and he had 10 and everybody's followed him ever since, you know. Every ordination I've ever been to has 10 areas. Everybody who's in our camps always divides it up into 10. So those, you just have to know, you can chafe at it and say, I don't like that system. I want 11. I'm going to add one more to it. You'll be the only guy with 11, but that's okay with me, you know, but just remember that's the system and that's what we'll be studying in those areas. Okay. Any questions on that, the areas of doctrine or theology? We're just going to cover the first three in this class, Bible, God and Christ. Why study this? I gave you. A couple of articles in your notes here. One is called The Foundation of Faith by Dr. Reynolds Showers. I'd encourage you to read that. That's three pages right there for your 50 pages. All right. That is an excellent one. As you read through it, he will he will show you that he'll cover most of what I just covered again, and that'll help you. Repetition really helps you. But what do you help you to see is that have you ever heard people say doctrine is not important? And why did you guys show up tonight? I mean, this is not even relevant to your life. I mean, if I had a class on how to raise kids, you would all show up, right? Not you. All right. All right. We won't go there. I had the wrong question. If I had a class tonight on how to control your anger. There you go. That's relevant. You know, usually there's several reasons why people say doctrine, theology. That's nice for some guys who sit in seminaries and get dry as dust and bored out of their minds. You know, real people don't need to study that. And I've had many people say that, oh no, theology, doctrine, you know, why would you want to study it? Why would it be important? Well, let's ask why. Why do people say it's not important? Many people have said doctrine, that's divisive. I'm not going there. And you'll notice in the modern church, a lot of times we stay away from doctrine because it is divisive. If you say, I'm a Baptist, you know, who do you think you are? You think you're the only guys going to heaven? Well, I didn't say that, did I? You know, I just said, if you want to summarize my life and my understanding of truth, that I kind of fall in the camp of those called Baptists. And there are those who fall in the camp called Lutheran or whatever. But as I understand scripture, OK, so we stay away from it. It's divisive. What do you believe about the end times? That's divisive. I mean, you split us all up on that one, right? So it's divisive. It's offensive. Why else would people say, don't study that stuff, man? I don't want to go to church to study doctrine. It's boring because it's irrelevant. Usually it's boring. Any subject can be boring when it's taught in a boring way, right? So it's irrelevant. It's not where the rubber meets the road. Who cares about the impeccability of Christ? I don't even know how to spell that word. Do you? I don't even understand what the issue is. What does it matter if Christ was sinless or not? Well, maybe it does matter. When you think about it, maybe it does matter if Christ was without sin. That might have some impact, actually, in my life somewhere down the line, if you really take that, you know? So maybe it was important to figure that one out. But many people say it's irrelevant, boring. Any other ones? Oh, there you go. It's hard work. Have you ever done a study of whatever? Just take a topic. I did a study once of cities. What does the Bible say about cities? Are they good or bad? You know what you have to do? You have to get out your concordance and write down every verse in the scripture that has a reference to cities. And even when it doesn't say the word city, if there's a reference to a city in an indirect way, you got to look them up. Now you got them all on a piece of paper. Now you got to read through them all and figure it out. Is it good or bad? When is it good? When is it bad? Does God like them? Does God not like them? Does God want us to live in cities? Does He not want us to live in cities? I'll tell you, it takes a lot of work. And then finally, you've got to put it in a nice package and present it to people. Try to do that with sin. Try to do that with Satan. Try to do that with all these... I mean, it is a lot of work. It's so much easier to buy Ryrie's book and just tell him what he said. Trust me. So there's a lot of reasons why people... Read the article by Showers, The Foundations of Faith. He has a reference in there. The doctrine is the endangered species of the church. Whatever. I'd like you to go to Acts 2, 42. And read that. Somebody read Acts 2.42. Would you raise your hand if you do that? Thank you, Al. Somebody read 2 Timothy 3.16. Thank you, Rosemary. And somebody read 2 Timothy 2.2. Thank you, Nick. All right. Let's just read these verses. Why in the world would we be concerned about doctrine, Al? So what did they continue steadfastly in? Part of it was the apostles doctrine. All right. So at least in the early church, they met every day for a while there, it seems like. I mean, it says that in the scripture. And they continued steadfastly, and they just didn't worship God. And they just didn't have communion. They just didn't pray or have fellowship. They also continued steadfastly in the apostles doctrine. They were constantly involved in it and understanding it. So it seems like it was pretty important to the early church. Rosemary, 2 Timothy 3.16. OK. Is God breathing and profitable for what did you say? Teaching right there. Some of our translations is doctrine. All right. It is profitable. One of the things you get out of this book is you you come up with God's teaching, God's truth, God's doctrine, if you would. How about Second Timothy 2 to Nick? So Paul is saying, OK, what you heard from me, I want you to pass on to the next people and you just keep teaching it, teaching it. So the point is, from scripture, you can't help but sense, and those are just three verses that I came up right off the top of my head without even thinking, that doctrine seems to have been very, very important. So teaching is important. I gave you another article, Should We Kick Theology Out the Door? And you'll want to read that one from Ernest Pickering, and that would count for your pages as well. Do you want to kick doctrine out the door? Again, an article on the move, and there is a move. There's no question about it. If you went to the average Christian today and said, you know what we're studying on Sunday morning? We're studying basic Bible doctrine. And most of the people, including many Christians, would look at you like, I'm not going to that church. Whoa, that must be as boring as it gets. That must be where you all fall asleep, dry as dust. All right. Another article, interesting. Doctrine really matters. This is done by a man who really is not in our camp per se. So he's not like prejudiced our way or anything like that. He did a survey study. of why people joined and became part of a church. He studied that there were those who went from this church to that church, and you can see the statistics. But also those who came from nothing, the unchurched, and became part of the church. One interesting thing as you do it is that he kept coming up with this thing that It kept asking people, why did you choose that church? You were on church. Why did you do that? Why that church and not the one down the road? Or people, why did you move from one church to the other? It always came up to two things. One is they had a belief system that I could understand. Doctrine was always number one. Number one reason people joined the church was doctrine. And that statistic totally blows us away because most of the studies that we've done by Gallup and Barna and all the rest are done not of the people who have chosen to join a church. It's a survey of people who are already in a church. And the people who are in the church are not interested in doctrine. The people who are joining churches choose a church because of doctrine number one and preaching number two. It's always those two, number one and number two. So you can read that article. As one guy says in there, I can go anywhere and get nothing. I want to go to a church that has something. And so that's a great statement. We did a series on there really is a difference. Hopefully this will come up. And when we did that, we recognized that at least in dispensational covenant theology, it does make a difference what you believe. Okay. People will tell me repeatedly, okay, so there's covenant theology, there's dispensational theology, there's Baptist theology, there's Lutheran theology, and it doesn't matter. It really, really doesn't matter. So I just want you to know it really does matter. And if you want that series, you can get it as well. These are some of the differences just between covenant and dispensational theology that we pointed out in that series. When it comes to communion, one sees it as sacraments, the other sees it as ordinance. That's a world of difference. When it comes to baptism, one does infants, the other is the dog. Eschatology, one is amiel, one is premiel. When it comes to Israel, some see it as the church, some see it as Israel. Old Testament law, some say it's for today, some say it's for Israel only. Dispensational covenant, as we go back. Resurrection, one general resurrection versus one first and the second resurrection. The church, one sees it as a denomination, one sees it as a fellowship. Church government, elder rule versus congregational. Obviously there are exceptions to all of these, but in general that's true. Sunday, one sees it as a Sabbath, one sees it as the Lord's Day. Giving, one sees it as a tithe that you must do, some sees it as an offering that you can do. The other sees it as social and spiritual. And you would find that, by the way, if you've ever gone to a covenant church, their missions program is very social minded. And in our circles, it's almost always spiritually minded. History, one sees the kingdom is getting better and better, and the other sees the world is getting worse and worse. Hermeneutics, they have two forms of hermeneutics. We have one form, ours is literal. Authority, the Bible and creeds hold, versus the Bible alone. And you'd have to take that series. But the point is that there really is a difference, what you believe. And there is a difference between covenant, dispensational, Baptist, Lutheran, Reformed. And you say it doesn't really matter. There is a difference, there really is. I think there's very important for us to understand that. Any questions on that? Great. Hopefully we see there is a difference. Let's go to the next sheet, which is just a bunch of terms. And I wanted you to have one sheet with terms on because hopefully, at least for me, I like to have sheets like this I can put in a certain place. And when I need a what does that word mean? I can always run to one place and start looking up in a hundred place. Bible is a transliteration of the Greek word biblios, which means book. All right. So we just call it the Bible because it is the book. And when it comes to it, when the fire hits your house and you've got to grab one book, which one are you grabbing? Well, hopefully it's not your cookbook. All right. Well, maybe you will because you can always buy a new Bible. But if it really came down to it, you could only have one book. You'd want the book. So it was called the Bible. That is a tremendously impressive statement when people called it in history, the Bible, the book. It is the one. When I graduated from high school, walked across a platform out of a public school, they handed me first a Bible. Every one of us students got a Bible, first thing. And after we had the Bible, then we went to the next person. He gave us a diploma. And we were reminded at the public school, it is this book that's important. Your diploma, that's okay. But it is secondary. It is absolutely secondary to what this book will teach you. And so we've always lived with that. We somewhat had that in our culture. Hopefully it's in our lives. The Bible means book or Biblia. Canon, that's what you shoot, right? Canon means the measuring rule or the standard. How many books of the Old and New Testament? 66. I've given this quiz many times. There's how many books in the Bible? And they go 66. And how many in the Old Testament? 39. How many in the New Testament? 28. 66 books of the Old and New Testament, which are considered God's direct revelation to mankind. and are therefore the true Christian standard, there's the word canon, of faith and conduct. So we believe there are 66, obviously the Catholics believe there's the apocryphal in between, but canon means the standard. Those are the standard books, those are God's books. Illumination is the work of the Holy Spirit by which men by which man is enabled to accurately understand the Word of God, discern its spiritual content, and thereby implement it into life. And 1 Corinthians 2 is a great passage on that. And so, illumination is the work of the Holy Spirit, allowing us to understand it. That's why so often when you say something to your unsafe people, they go, duh. I was there once, it was like, duh, what does that mean, you know? They are spiritually discerned. God's spirit has to help you understand some things. So that's illumination. Inerrancy means to be truthful or true. It's without error. We're going to see that in a little while. Infallibility means some people think they're the same. They are not. They're awful close. Infallibility means to be not truthful, but trustworthy. This is infallible. This is trustworthy. You can go to bank on this one. Now, it has to be true to be trustworthy, obviously, so they go very much together. But remember the differences. Inerrancy, truthful. Infallibility, trustworthy. You might even see that on a quiz somewhere. Inspiration means to be God-breathed, in general, or that work of the Holy Spirit in superintending men and writing the Scriptures. And we'll have a fuller definition. A paraphrase is a restating of an English version or verse could be a verse in singular or version into the words of another and not a translation from the original language. So some Bibles are translations. They took the Greek and Hebrew and translated it from Greek and Hebrew into English or French or Spanish or whatever. Some are paraphrases. They took the English Bible and that's what you can do. You can sit down with the English Bible and say, OK, Psalm 23, let me write it in my own words. And that's a paraphrase. And that's not wrong. But you realize that a paraphrase is a whole notch away from the original truth. You know, if you want to rewrite Psalm 23 in your own words, that might be nice for your understanding, might help you to understand it. But I wouldn't try to sell it, probably. All right. That's probably not a good thing. That's what a paraphrase is. The living Bible, the message, and so are paraphrases. Preservation. I just put these in alphabetic order. The act of God working through provideo. What's a provideo? providence, right? That's what providence means. Working through providence and men, by which he ensured the content and existence of his word. In other words, this book has been preserved how many years? A long time. The last book was written probably on 100 AD. And the first book was written a long time before that, 1500 years before that, probably. So God has, you know, the chances of this being preserved historically would be pretty small. How many, by the way, know that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? How many take that as a fact? Well, all of us do. History tells us that. You know what it's based on? You are believing that and you have only five references in all the original historical works that that ever happened. But we all believe it is a fact, right? You know, God really did preserve this book. If you believe Caesar crossed the Rubicon, if you're gullible enough to believe that on the basis of five texts, you just think this book has 5,300 texts that would tell you exactly or almost exactly the same thing. OK, so that's preservation. Translation, the transfer of a message in one language to another language. All right. So I pick up a Greek Bible and I put it into English or something like that. Transliteration. What's the difference between translation and transliteration? Transliteration is to rewrite a word in the alphabet of another language. In other words, so biblios is a Greek word. So I'm going to transliterate it and I write it Bible. Translated, I'd have to translate it book. Right. You see the difference? All I did was write the Greek word in the alphabet of the English language. There are two classic examples of Greek word baptism in the Greek word deacon. are almost never translated in our English translations. They're almost always transliterated. Isn't that interesting? Almost every other word in Greek or Hebrew is translated. But when they bumped into those two words, they transliterated them. Why did they do that? It's interesting. It's only in English. If you find a German Bible, a Spanish Bible, a French Bible. I did a study of the word baptism and I think I came up with a hundred different translations They always, when they saw the Greek word baptism, they translated it into their word, which means immersion. That's what the Greek word means. Right. But in English, we didn't translate it. We transliterate it baptism. We just wrote it again in our language. Why do we do that? Why did they do that? Can you imagine practicing infant baptism, sprinkling, and you come across this word that means immersion? Now, what do I do? I'll just transliterate it baptism. Same thing with deacon, by the way. They should have translated it what? It would totally change our churches. If every time in the Bible you read the word servant instead of deacon, deacon means an official who's elected by the congregation by a vote of at least 50%, you know, has an office, you know, in the church, etc, etc. And you read the word servant, you realize, I mean, you just think totally different, don't you? If I said he's a servant of our church, or if I said he's a deacon of our church, you would think two different thoughts and you should think the same thing. So that's a transliteration. Revelation is the self-disclosure of God about himself. man, the universe, etc., which man would otherwise not have the means of knowing authoritatively." So this is the revelation of God. No man could have dreamt this one up. No one could have wrote it without God self-disclosing it to us. That's very, very important. And by the way, again, I love Cahill. Cahill, The Gift of the Jews, that's his whole point. How did these people, how did this group of people called Jews, how did they ever come up with this book? They're a genius. It was their gift to the world, the Old Testament. They came up with this thing called One God. And as you go through it, you realize he caught it. He caught the whole message of the Old Testament. It just doesn't give God the credit for it. So these guys were brilliant. Instead of having to pay for your sins and to sacrifice babies and all kinds of crazy things that all the other religions came up with, these people came up with a God who was going to punish sin, but made a provision through the blood of sacrificial lambs so that people didn't have to kill their kids. What a great group of people. And then they came up with a book called the Bible. Their writings were authoritative, as if they were from God. And he just, you read him and you realize he is just totally amazed how anybody could have written a book like that. You know why it's amazing? Because nobody could have written a book like that. It is God's self-disclosure. You never would have guessed this one. You never would have come up with a religion like this if you had to write the book. How do you take care of your sins? What is sin? Where is God? How did we come here? All those questions. You write it by yourself and mankind comes up with all kinds of crazy answers. It is only God's self-disclosure. That's why it is, which man would otherwise not have the means of knowing authoritatively. You never would have guessed this and you never would have known it with authority. If I ask you today, where did we come from? You're all going to say we were Create it. Hopefully you all say that. Are you sure about that? Why are you sure about that? Because you went to a seminar by Answers in Genesis? No. They might have helped you. They're pretty good. You know why you know that? And you believe with all your heart it's true? And you think it's authoritatively right? Because this book says so. And I could go down all the issues of sin, salvation, etc, etc. Why do you believe that? Because God disclosed to me and to you A message that I never would have guessed or known, and for sure I would have never known it was authoritative. But I have a book. And that's why as a little kid growing up, you were taught the Bible and you believed it. Then you got to know enough to question it. Hopefully you still believed it. It's great to that revelation. Finally, version is a translation from the original into the language of a people. And it's really the same as a translation. And of course, there are various authorized version NIV, NASV, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So those are the introductory statements on doctrine, theology, and bibliology. And I wanted to cover that in an hour, and I just did it. So any questions?