So you see, as we looked at today, and I'll tell you guys, the question of the century is the final authority. That is the question. It's not world peace, it's not world hunger, it is what is the final authority. And I showed you, it is not man, it is certainly not education, and by no means is it science. Our final, absolute final authority in all matters of faith and practice is the Bible. And when I'm talking about the Bible, I'm not talking about some imaginary book that exists out there in the ether. I'm talking about a book that I'm holding in my hand right now. This book is the absolute final authority in all matters of faith and practice. So, review chapter three. We'll give you a test next class on chapter three and on the material that you got here today. And we'll see you guys next week, okay? You guys have a good weekend. Doc, you got a couple seconds? Yeah. You've been telling us that the final authority is the Bible, but I mean, there's like 300 of them out there. I mean, which one are you talking about? Let me tell you, there's not 300. There's not 200. There's not 50. There's not 25. There's not 10. There's not 5. There's not even 3 Bibles. There's just 1. No, there's not 1. There's 2. Two Bibles. What do you mean there's only two Bibles? Well, listen, there's another class coming in here, so we can't hang around here. You got time for a cup of coffee? Sure, sure. Okay, well let's go get a cup of coffee and we'll talk about this. Okay. And when I say there's two Bibles, you're going to a bookstore, I know. You see, I'm... Thank you. Oh, thank you very much. And you see a bunch of them on a shelf, and you go, no, there's got to be more than two. But the fact is that every Bible that you can buy today comes from only one of two locations. There's a line of manuscripts that come from Antioch and Syria. There's another line of manuscripts that come from Alexandria in Egypt. Now, what do you know about from the Bible? What do you know about Antioch and Syria? I think it was the place where the disciples were first called Christians. Absolutely. Our name Christian comes from Antioch. It was also the head of the New Testament Church. When the Apostle Paul, when he went out on a missionary journey, he left from Antioch. When he came back, he came back to Antioch. That was the center of New Testament Christianity. In fact, many of the originals that we have today may have been penned there. Alright, today in existence on this planet are 5909 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, some entire books, some pieces of manuscript the size of this sugar pack. The vast majority read with what is known as the Texas Receptus. That is the Greek that comes out of Antioch. So it comes from Antioch through the Texas Receptus into the King James Bible right here on this desk. It'd be like this coffee, okay? This is the line of manuscripts, the vast, bigger than this one, because most of them come out of Antioch. The other line of manuscripts, which officially is known as the critical text, which if you think about that, just the fact that it's critical should tell you there's a problem, they went down to Alexandria, Egypt. Now, what do you know about Egypt from the Bible? Not a lot of good. It kind of represented the world. Israelites were in slavery. Absolutely. In fact, when God wanted to use a bad example in the book of Revelation, He wants to say something bad about Jerusalem, He compares it to Sodom and Egypt. So the only good thing about Egypt is it can be used as a bad example. So, good manuscripts went to Alexandria. Now, we not only get manuscripts, but we get something else from these two locations, and that's what I call a mentality, or a philosophy, if you will. The Antiochian mentality and the Alexandrian mentality, or philosophy, or view of the Bible. This one, Antiochian, the Bible is perfect and cannot be improved on. Alexandria, the Bible is not perfect and can be improved on. Now those two, what view of the Bible do you hold? Well, this one right here, but these are both still coffee. So you accept the Bible is perfect and it cannot be improved on, correct? Yeah. And you say they're both coffee. The problem is that when some of these from Antioch came down into Alexandria, where they did not believe the Bible was perfect, they thought they could improve on it. And it's strange that people that think the Bible isn't perfect always think they're the ones that can improve on it. And so they began to make changes. An example, they didn't believe in a trinity. They didn't believe in a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So they took that verse out, 1 John 5, verse 7. And they made these changes, and they said that they were taking a book that was imperfect and making it better. So after they got done, okay, there it is. Drink your coffee. Drink it. No, thanks. It's coffee, right? What's wrong with it? It's ruined. Exactly. Well, that's the same thing about modern translations. When you go into a Bible bookstore, if you see 25 Bibles, you're not seeing 25. You're seeing these two. You see the King James, that's Antiochian through the Texas Receptus to the King James. You see everything else, it's the Alexandrian through the critical text to New American Standard, Living Bible, Goodness for Modern Man, Today's English Version, Contemporary English Version, New International Version, all the modern... The NIV? Oh yeah, New International Version comes right out of Alexander Easter. When I was like 12 years old, my grandma gave me a New International Version. In fact, she would read it to me and still carry it with me today. You know, actually, my dad got saved by reading out of a New International Version. Are you saying that maybe he's not saved? No. No, I wouldn't say that at all. Let me ask you this. Did your dad trust Jesus Christ as his personal Savior? Yeah. The Bible says the gospel is that Jesus Christ died according to Scripture, was buried, and rose again the third day according to Scripture. That is the gospel story. That gospel story can be found clearly in the King James Bible in 1 Corinthians 15. But you can find that gospel truth in many modern translations. So a person can come to the knowledge of their lost state and their need to trust Christ as their personal Savior through a modern translation. But if you can get saved out of a modern translation like the New International Version, why does it matter? Aren't they all kind of the same then? Well, they're both coffee, right? Yeah. You gonna drink this one? No. Why not? It's been tainted. It's corrupted. Corrupted. You can lead somebody to Christ showing them 15, 20 verses, right? Yeah. When I lead them to Christ and I go, I've shown you a dozen verses and you end up saved. So what do you think is in the rest of this book for you? Growth. You can grow because this one isn't corrupted and this one is. Two Bibles. Two coffees, pure, corrupted. Could you show me in here where this one's been corrupted? Oh, yeah. In fact, there's 16 whole verses taken out of this, and I really can't. I don't want you to accept the King James Bible as the perfect Word of God because I say so. I just don't want you to say it's got mistakes in it because somebody else says so. All right? Because you're making a man your final authority. Remember back in class? It wasn't man is our final authority in all matters of faith and practice. It's what? Bible. The Bible. All right. I will answer any question you have concerning this issue, but here's my problem. I've got to meet another guy in about five minutes. I don't want to leave him hanging. Here's what I'm asking from you. I want you to take what I give you, like what you saw today, and I want you to think about it. Will you think about it? Yeah. Okay. Okay. God bless you. I'll see you in class and we'll get together. Maybe I'll make you another cup of coffee. Sound good? Yeah, maybe. It's good stuff. It's a famous recipe out of Alexandria. Alright, take care buddy. Thanks. All right. Get a light. I must have forgot a light. All right, brother, would you hand these out for me? I don't have enough for every person, but at least have enough for the adults, I believe. I think your Bible's in turn to Psalms chapter number 12. Some people want to know why it's important to acknowledge a Bible as being the final authority for all matters of faith and practice in a Christian's life. And you have to have some kind of final authority, because if you don't, that makes you the final authority. And when you don't acknowledge that there is a final authority in the life of a Christian, then Bible reading is not important to you. You don't care about it, which why would you if you're the final decision on what's right and wrong? Because there's definitely differences in the Bible translations. And this is a visual illustration of what he talked about there that we're going to go over in just a minute. I know many of you are looking over it, and that's fine. But in just a second, we're actually going to go through and kind of just talk about some of these things. But this is the layout of the original writings that took place all the way back in the very beginning. Job is the oldest book in your Bible. going all the way back to 1,500 years before Christ and all the way through all those original writings that were done. And then it shows you the green is God's preserved line. Look at me in Psalms chapter number 12, if you would, unless somebody changed up here. I have the Bible open to Psalms chapter 12 here. This is an original 1611 pulpit Bible. this Bible is and it has the misspelled words and everything in it. And so, but that's the original 1611 pulpit Bible was opened to Psalms chapter number 12. And I mentioned the misspelled words, I'm going to talk about that at some point during the study, that the different additions to the King James Bible, none of them changed the text. They just corrected spellings and type errors from the printers. Okay, and we can show all that. None of them ever changed or revised the Bible to say something different than what it was supposed to say. All right, we'll go over that later. Psalms chapter 12 and verse number six, Bible said, the words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord. Thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever. So God makes a statement here in the book of Psalms through David stating that he's going to preserve his word forever. And so we believe by faith that God did that, that God preserved His Word. And we have a lot of other verses that we'll cover throughout the study. I'm not going to go over a whole lot on inspiration of Scripture. I might at some point, but I doubt we'll get through it over the summer. I want to deal with the preservation of Scripture. I believe that most people understand that God inspired Scripture. There's a lot of universities and colleges and Christians and pastors that believe that God inspired the originals. There's people that won't argue with you over the inspiration of the originals. Now, there are people out there that don't believe that God inspired a book and inspired the Word of God. And I'm not going to argue with them throughout the study because they're in the minority. Most so-called Christians in universities and colleges that teach the Bible, they believe that God inspired the originals, but that past the originals, you cannot have the perfect word of God. And that you see that page there, look at all these different Bible versions and look at all these different different texts. And, you know, as you go through there, there's even on the preserved line, there's people that go way back and they'll go to Tyndall's Bible and things like that. But God preserved his word. and uh... got the corrupt line there we're we're gonna look at some of those here just a second but god promised that he would preserve his words so i want to deal with the preservation of scripture the bible was written over a period of fifteen hundred years the bible was written by over forty different authors Among them were kings, military leaders, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, tax collectors, poets, statesmen, musicians, scholars, shepherds. God used all different walks of life to help write the Bible. of the bible was written in many different places in many different times Greek and Aramaic. The Bible was written in many different literary styles, prose, poetry, historical narrative, romance, law, biography, parable, allegory, and prophecy. It was written in many different writing styles. God used the personalities of some of the men in writing scripture, but it was still inspired of God. The Bible addresses hundreds of difficult issues without one single contradiction. How can you have a Bible that spans over 1,500 years, 40 different authors from all different kinds of walks of life and background, and there not be one error? The answer is God. That's the only answer. That's the only possible way you could do that, is God. It's a book of great diversity. Yet in spite of all the diversity, it unfolds in a single, continuous story, and it does so without ever contradicting itself one time. All these different people write at different times over 1,500 years, and when it's compiled, it's one continuous story. And you read prophecies that were in the Old Testament that came true in the New Testament that were written so many years before it ever even took place. Those people weren't even alive when it took place. And that's because God inspired it. Again, I'm not going to go over all the inspiration part. We might do that later. But the preservation of Scripture is what I want to look at over some Wednesday nights over the summer. And so, preservation. Preservation is the process by which God has supernaturally protected His Word through many reproductions and translations. The idea of preservation holds that God has faithfully superintended His Word down through the ages, so that even today, some 3,500 years later, After portions of the Bible were written down, we can say that we possess, that we love, that we can read, and we can hold the perfect Word of God. And I will use this statement many times as I'm going through here, but if God can't keep a book that does not sin against Him, that does not mess up, then how is He going to keep me saved? If I can't believe that He'll preserve a book, Amen. If I can't believe that he'll do that, how in the world am I ever going to have faith that he'll keep me saved? But he does. I have eternal security through him, and I learned that from this book. But he can keep the book. He promised preservation. The Bible promises preservation for itself. And over the course of this, we're gonna go over many of those verses as we go through here. And so, there's original authors, of course. At one time, there was a man that penned down, by the inspiration of God, and wrote down, and there's original autographs. There's original letters. But we do not know where any of those actual originals are. They have found Dead Sea Scrolls, and I'll get to some of that later. They found what they have found is copies of the originals. Somebody wants to come up and say, I believe the word of God word for word in the originals, and I say, where are the originals? Where are they? And they don't have them. None of these universities have them. Somebody might have like a little corner of a piece of paper that they found that they think might be something. And so you can't find them. The actual writings of Paul and John and Moses and Peter and James and Daniel, Isaiah, all those biblical writers, you're not gonna be able to find that original. and I'm gonna show you some examples in scripture as we go through here where the original was destroyed before they even finished the chapter. All right, we'll look at a few of those as time permits. Anybody gonna be interested in this study for a few weeks? All right, thank you, David. All right, the word of God has been preserved for us through seven major languages, all right? So in our verse it says, thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever. Verse six, the words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth purified seven times. All right, the word of God's been preserved for us through seven major languages. It was through Hebrew, that's the Masoretic Hebrew Old Testament text. Aramaic, some of your Bible was actually originally written in Aramaic. That's gonna be found in the book of Daniel and the book of Ezra. In Greek, which is where we compiled for the Texas Receptus, Syriac, in Latin, in German, and then finally in English. English is the seventh one. Now, if any of you were here when Brother Bill Grady taught on critical race theory and what's going on in America with white people being bad, the Bible said that God enlarged Japheth. which is the white man, but he did it because of this book. God chose for that to be the route that he was going to preserve his word. And God got the Bible to Europe. so that they could get it all across the world. And that's how God chose to preserve the Bible. All right? And so God preserved it through the English King James Bible. And he used Martin Luther. He used other guys. We'll see on that paper here in a little bit. I'm not going to go over all these languages. for sake of time, but there's seven different languages that God used to preserve the word of God. Seven, and as you know, seven is the number of completion, it's the number of perfection, and God said in his word that he would be purified seven times. All right? And then in addition to those seven, there's also been seven English Bibles printed, and this being the final, the seventh one, the one that we hold today. All right, now I know there's some that use older versions of the 1611. Again, that's fine. It's the same text, the same doctrine, the same words. But it's gone through seven different revisions. Okay, I don't like to use the word revisions. It's gone through seven different editions. Let's put it that way. They weren't revised. They didn't change. They didn't change the words. They didn't change the doctrine. They corrected spelling and type errors that were found in the old printing presses. Can you imagine some of the original printing presses? Amen. I mean, it was rough when they first started. They weren't iPhone, you know, spell checking. Thank the Lord for it, because iPhone deletes God every time I write it in my phone. But the Bible told us that it would be as silver tried in a furnace purified seven times. And it's no coincidence that there was seven languages. And there's no coincidence that there was seven English English translations that came through to get the one that we're holding today, the seventh one. And I believe the one that we have today needs no correction. It needs no fixing at all, all right? And so the seven English Bibles that went through, the first one was William Tyndale, and that was a New Testament only, all right? William Tyndale, and if you want some of these notes, I can give them to you. I'm just gonna kinda read through them. We talk about faith, I believe. Even without all this, I believe by faith that God has a perfect word because he said he did. Okay, and again, I'd have more respect for somebody that used a different Bible version and said, this is my final authority, this is the perfect Bible. I'd have more respect for that person than somebody that says there isn't one, just pick one. You know what that means? That makes you God. That makes you God instead of God. All right, William Tyndale in 1525 was the first printed, the first printed English Bible. Now before that, in 1382, John Wycliffe had the first English Bible that was handwritten. OK, it's gone through seven printings and the first one was William Tyndale. But before that, in 19 or in 1382, John Wycliffe actually hand wrote in English the Bible, the Bible, that Bible. If you look on the chart there, you see in the very middle, it says John Wycliffe, first English translation hand copied. I'll see that. That copy was corrupted by a man by the name of John Purvey using Jerome's Latin Vulgate. After Wycliffe died, he took that handwritten copy and he got this corrupted Latin Vulgate and he took that And you can see just to the right there, you see that Jerome's Latin Vulgate, 400 A.D. in Dewey Rame's English Catholic Bible. All right, this man, John Purvey, took that Jerome's Latin Vulgate and he used that to correct John Wycliffe's first edition, the first handwritten edition in English, and corrupted that line, okay? And so you see it ends right there, that one that he wrote by hand, it ends right there. The guy corrupted it, it never went any further than that. William Tyndale in 1525 had the first printed English Bible. It was incomplete, it was only the New Testament. Miles Coverdale in 1535, he completed the first English Bible. Thomas Matthew in 1537 had the third printed English Bible. He also went by an alias of John Rogers. And we don't have time to get into all the history of some of these men, but you can read about some of them in the Fox's Book of Martyrs, the people that died so that we could have a Bible. These men went through a time in church history where you were killed for believing what we believe today. All right, and you can study some of these men later on. So he's an alias of John Rogers, all right? In 1538, there was a fourth printed English Bible. Uh, there was some revisions made or additions made in the book of Matthew. And, uh, I've got I've got some of these broke out the different things that were changed as they did this in every one of the changes. None of them were doctrinal. Of course, the first one was a New Testament only. Second one was the complete English one. All right. So the great Bible that was printed in 1538. And then after that, um, The Geneva Bible was the next one to be printed after that. We have a Stephanus Greek text. That was a Greek text that came in during that time, all right? But the next English printed Bible was the Geneva Bible in 1560. That was the fifth one. Then you had the Bishop's Bible in 1568. That's the sixth printed English Bible. Then we have another Greek text that came out. All of these Greek texts were in line with the original manuscripts and the original Greek manuscripts and lined up with it, okay? All right, and then the King James Authorized Version 1611 came out as the seventh printed English Bible. God promised in his word he'd purify seven times. So we have seven English Bibles that were printed. Now that 16, that AB 1611 went through some additions and again corrected some of the spellings. If any of you would like to come up here and read this one up here, you'll find that the spelling of some of those words is way different. Right? And so there's a lot of spelling that changed in the typeset on the printer and things like that, lining up some of the verses and the chapters and things like that that were just misprinted, but there was no doctrinal changes at all. These other Bibles over here that are in the orange column, there are major doctrinal changes took place in these Bibles. And maybe sometime during the study, I have a couple of these in my in my library in the office in there, and maybe sometime I'll hand some of them out and we'll go through some of the verses and look at the major doctrinal changes that took place. It's not just fixing these in vowels. It's not just fixing archaic words. Matter of fact, every modern Bible translation has archaic words too. Every one of them. They say that, well, I like to use the NIV because it reads easier. I can show you where it reads harder than the King James Bible. The NIV says that somebody else killed Goliath. There's 16 verses missing from the New Testament, completely gone. And they're not irrelevant verses, they're major doctrine verses. All right? And even all the way down to the very newest, which is the Holman Christian Standard Bible, that's the Southern Baptist Bible. They came out with that in 2017. All right. That's just a few years ago. But they came out with their own Bible. And it came from this corrupt line of texts. All right. Even the new King James version. There was actually two different versions of the New King James that came out, but they made major doctrinal changes in that, but it was very sly, because they called it the New King James, to make it seem like it followed the same text as the other ones. They were just gonna update some of the words in it, but they didn't, they updated doctrine. We heard in the video that some of those men that found these Alexandrian texts are that develop the Alexandrian text out of Alexandria, Egypt, that there were certain doctrines they didn't believe in. They didn't believe in the Trinity. So why would you need a verse in the Bible that says something about the Trinity? Oh, we don't. Take it out. Those are the some of the texts that were used for these modern translations. And there's and there's so much to cover on this subject. I'm just going to skim the surface over the next several weeks. And so the King James Version was the seventh printed English Bible, and if you look to the right there, these are the additions that corrected spelling, punctuation, and printer errors all the way up to the final revision that we have today. If you look there in 1769, that is, if you have a King James Bible today, That's not the original 1611. If you have a King James Bible today, that's the one you have. And it went through, and you can actually see the different changes that took place in each one of those. Okay, there to the right. All right, and again, I'm probably not gonna go over each and every one of these things, because we're talking about like a long course. But we can if we need to, if time allows. But you want to ask, why am I doing this? And why am I going over all this stuff? And the reason is that we encourage you to read your Bible every day, to follow the word of God. We stand up and preach from the Bible and say, this is God's final authority. You need to obey it. We're going to stand to the judgment seat of Christ one day. And you need to live a Christian life that pleases the Lord. And everything that we're preaching is based off of this book. And so if this book is wrong, or it has errors in it, then everything we do has errors in it. Right? And so there's churches today, the colleges, the college in Birmingham, Birmingham Southern, what's the name of the Southern Baptist College in Birmingham? What's it called? Not just Sanford, there's another one. It's like the school in New Orleans. There's one in Birmingham. But Sanford also is another one. But none of the professors there, none of those people believe that we have a perfect Bible. None of them. There are Bible institutes and Bible colleges that people go to every day. They'll leave a good church where they believe the Bible's the final authority and word of God. And when they leave that university or leave that college, or leave that seminary. Sometimes we call it the cemetery, because they go in there and die spiritually. They go in there and they leave, and they don't believe that there's a perfect Bible anymore. Well, because there's not a perfect Bible, when the Bible says that I need to live this way as a Christian, and I need to have these standards that match God's standards, because I'm a child of God, and I've been bought with a price, if I don't believe there's a final authority, then I can go over to this other Bible version that's a little bit nicer than this one. Vanity. The book of Ecclesiastes talks a lot about vanity. The new Bible translations, they do away with that. They make it a whole lot nicer word. And we can go over some of those as time allows, but I believe that this is the perfect and inerrant word of God and I base my life off of it. And we have manuscript evidence to prove that the Bible that we're holding today follows that line of manuscripts. But even if I didn't have this, I believe there's a perfect word of God. And when I have some of these other Bible versions, if you want to compare them side by side, there's verses missing. Why would I want to, I mean, would any of you go buy a book from a store, a novel or something that's just randomly missing paragraphs out of the book? Would anybody go spend money on that? If you've ever purchased an NIV, you did. And they don't tell you about it. At Teen Challenge, we do Bible drills. Every time we do it, Brother Scott and Brother Bowen kind of glare over at me because they know what I'm going to do. Put your Bibles in the air. Matthew 17, 21, go. And it's mass confusion. The verse says this, this go without but by prayer and fasting. That's what the verse says. And so, that's a good verse. He's telling them how to get this miracle taking place and how to get this prayer answered. He goes, you've got to pray and fast. That's a Bible doctrine. Completely gone out of the NIV. And so most of their Bible versions, when they open up, they jump up and they stand and then they go, oh wait a minute, it's not there. Don't they? And then all of a sudden, they all start sitting down. And then a lady that's maybe been there for a few months, she'll roll her eyes. If you've got a King James, it's in yours. It's just it's mass confusion. Dr. Gibbs going to go over some of that later on in some of these videos. And so I'm going to go over Lord willing. Again, I'm going to be gone some but when I'm not here, please come to church, support these other preachers. And If you were up preaching or doing something, you'd want people to be here to support you. So if you would be here, they've got good things to say. And so you please be here. But I'm going to I'm going to go over some of this stuff and go over some of these verses. And I'm going to show you from scripture where the originals were destroyed before the chapter was even over in the Bible. But yet we're reading it. How is that possible? One of the prophets ate the word of God. They ate it after they wrote it down, they ate it. Nobody read it. He wrote it and God said, OK, eat it. But yet I'm reading exactly what it said. How is that possible? What about the man that broke the first man to break all 10 commandments at one time? Moses. Broke all 10 at one time. What about him? Next thing you know, he goes back up and God's like, let me write it down again. Why? Because it's preserved in heaven. Right? There's illustrations of it being burned. Illustrations of it being tied to a rock and thrown in the water. All this is in the Bible. And all of a sudden, we're reading about it. Why is that? Preserved in heaven. God promised he would preserve his word. Amen. So we'll show some of those and we'll go through, Lord willing, over the summer, some Bible preservation. And there'll be some weeks that I'll miss because of not being here or whatever the case might be. But please come and hopefully this will be an interesting study to you. Maybe it'll encourage you to read your Bible. Man, this thing's precious. I mean, to think that this Bible I'm holding in my hand right here, God preserved it from the day it was wrote. and preserved it all the way through English because he knew that English would be the predominant language across the world. When I go over to Papua New Guinea and go to the school, Brother Jim, guess what they're talking in? English. In Papua New Guinea, they teach English in the schools and they're speaking in English in the public school in Papua New Guinea. Everywhere else, they're talking in talk pidgin. The English King James Bible is the main book of the of the country of Papua New Guinea. It is their book. It's their country book. All right. And there's other countries that English is a predominant language. God knew that that would be the predominant language. And guess what he did? He preserved it through through all that. Amen. These other countries that don't have it in their language, the missionaries take this book right here, the English King James, and they translate it into their language. All right, let's all stand. I hope this is a blessing to you. If anybody has any questions, I'll be glad to answer them, but we might answer them throughout the course of the study. And if anybody wants any handouts on any of my notes, I've got those as well. All right, let's go to the Lord in prayer.