At this time, let us turn to the insert in our bulletins to read together our Confession of Faith. As we continue in the Belgic Confession, we look at Article 6 as we continue to think about where do we get the truth that we understand to be foundational in this world. There are many people who point all over the place. Now, there are even some Bibles that have books in them that we understand not to be the Word of God. And so, what is that? What do we understand? And that's what we look at in Article 6 of the Belgian Confession. The difference between the canonical and apocryphal books. We distinguish those sacred books from the apocryphal visibly, the third and fourth books of Ezra, the book of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Yezusirach, Baruch, the appendix to the Book of Esther, the Song of the Three Children in the Furnace, the History of Susanna, of Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasseh, and the Two Books of the Maccabees, all of which the Church may read and take instruction from, so far as they agree with the canonical books. but they are far from having such power and efficacy that we may from their testimony confirm any point of faith or of the Christian religion, much less may they be used to detract from the authority of the other, that is, the sacred books. And so, brothers and sisters in our Lord Jesus Christ, if you open certain Bibles, you will find these books. And they are called the apocryphal books. And we have to understand that when the Old Testament, the Hebrew Old Testament was translated to the Septuagint, which what means speaks to the 70 elders, by Ptolemy II, that these were not originally part, but that, if you remember, the Egyptians like to gather lots of books. We have the great library at Alexandria. And guess what? when they were translating, we want these in there too. Well, then as we moved through history, Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, which he completed in 405 AD, and was the standard Bible of the church until the Reformation, he took those and put them in with the rest of the Bible. And so he did, however, preface them as not being from the Hebrew Old Testament and as not being canonical. But we have to understand that these are put in, and if you look at certain things that are attesting, these are the reasons we believe these things. That last section of this, article says, all of which the church may read and take instruction from so far as they agree with the canonical books. But they are far from having such power and efficacy that we may, from their testimony, confirm any point of faith or of the Christian religion. So right there, if people are referencing these and saying, this is why we believe this, no, no. That's not God's Word. But we have to understand, we can read them. They give us some history, but they do not contain the same theology, they do not contain the same salvation that is laid out for us in the rest of the Bible. So we have to understand that. And so as we may perhaps read them, and as we've been talking about in the New Testament and after the New Testament, there were many texts. And as we've talked about, some of them people say, oh yeah, yeah, we really should have the Gospel of Thomas in the Bible. Read it. It is not Bible. And the Holy Spirit will work in you if you are a Christian to understand that. Because it is just texts thrown together and they kind of grab a little bit from Scripture over here and over there. By the way, there were lots of these. And the early church fathers would write and say, this one is no good, that one is no good. Because they were well known. And so we have to understand that, and we have to understand we have in the Word of God the collection of those things which are truly the Word of God, and we've talked about that. So as we think about these other texts, we have to understand we can read them, they are historically helpful. And sometimes they actually confirm to us, in fact, most of the time when we read the history in them, they confirm that what God's Word says is really what God's Word says. Even those who were specifically set up to twist it. By the way, there are modern translations, too, that do the same sort of thing, and so we have to be careful of those. There are people who have messed with the Bible. I think one example is Jehovah's Witnesses. They like to use the King James, but then they also have their translation and it is twisted. They try to make sure that you can't see certain truths of Scripture, but if you really study it, you will find that the Bible that they have even teaches the divinity of Jesus and all of these other things. Now I want to say also, there are other books that can be very helpful to us that are non-canonical. We have Christian texts from early Christianity that do not have the canonical authority as we're talking about here. But they can be helpful for us, the Apostolic Fathers, the Ante-Nassim, before, not anti. And the Nicene and the Post-Nicene Fathers. You have 1st and 2nd Clement, the Didache, so many other books which confirm to us the chain of custody of what we have in the Bible in front of us. that what we have laid out in front of us hasn't been changed by somebody. How many people tell us that nowadays, right? Somebody took this thing, and you had some people smoking cigars in a back room somewhere, and they didn't like the Jesus that actually happened. So we're going to come up with this over here. By the way, that did happen with the Qur'an, but that's a different story. If you start reading the Qur'an, and you start studying that, The Quran that's used today was put together in the 1930s in Egypt by a public school district. And by the way, before that, going back just post-Muhammad, and I can't remember all of the history there, but there are sections that were written