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I'll tell you brother, this has been good, brother Jimmy. This has been good. But I know y'all are getting a little weary. But we've got to plow on here. But Jimmy, we sincerely appreciate the opportunity that Richardson Baptist Church has provided for us to be able to come and be able to hear this good preaching and be able to be encouraged. And we certainly have been encouraged today through the proclamation of the Word of God. And we appreciate the church and y'all's support of Deep South Bible College. Several years ago, Brother Len was burdened to begin a Bible college and asked me about coming and helping. And God had been burdened in my heart at the same time. And so we came over and this is, we ended our third year in May and are starting our fourth year. And we had, like Brother Caleb mentioned, we had 21 that enrolled for this semester. And our classes really don't start until the 26th of August. So I'm going to be trying to encourage some others who have shown some interest in coming on board and studying the Word of God with us. But Richardson Baptist Church has been such a blessing. And your dear pastor has been a tremendous encouragement to me and to our Bible college. We just thank you for it. Brother Jimmy serves on our board of directors and certainly don't want to take away from any of those men, but Brother Jimmy has shown so much interest in our Bible college. And so brother, we do thank you for that. We love you. Appreciate you. I'm wondering a little bit as to where to go here. And all of these messages have just uplifted me and encouraged me. And listening to Brother John, I'm kind of scared now I'm going to make a mistake in English. So if I, Brother John, if I dangle a participle or split an infinitive or hang a gerund, then I'm sorry. My wife gets on to me all the time about it. But I can tell you, you love the Word of God. You look at it and you put it in its context. That's commendable. Let's take our Bibles and turn over to Matthew chapter 4. Matthew chapter 4. Let's stand and just kind of stretch our legs a little bit. Matthew chapter 4. We'll begin reading in verse 1. It says, Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward and hungered. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone. but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Father, we come before you, Lord, and we thank you that you have counted us faithful, putting us into the ministry. And yet, God, we know that our worthiness is found in Jesus. Lord, our complete dependence is upon him. Lord, it is you that has called us. God, it's you that sustains us. And Lord, we pray that you would help us today as we try to impart these truths that you have laid on our heart. God, thank you for these gentlemen. These are servants that have ministered the word of God to us today. And Lord, we pray that you would give them a fresh anointing from heaven. God, that you would empower them to do your work. And so bless us all and help us in Jesus' name. Amen. But, Jimmy, I'm going to probably get another bottle of water, if you all don't mind. There you go. I see them over here. Brother Jimmy had six bottles of water and eight preachers. I'm not sure what we're going to say about that. And he's got three left. He used to kill me whenever I'd be sitting there and a preacher would take a big you know, drink water, you know, and I'm just sitting there in the pew and I'm dying for some water, you know, and he just kind of eggs it on, you know, but now I'm doing it myself. I don't know if it's because I'm 63 years old. I'm not really sure what it is, but, um, I know I was telling brother Jimmy, I said, brother, I don't want to be on a bone of contention, uh, at, at the conference. And I certainly don't want to be. Um, but I want to be obedient to God. And that really is our, one of our highest goals to be obedient to God. Um, anyway, I talked to brother Jimmy and, uh, a while back I was praying about what God would have me to preach. And, you know, sometimes preachers, y'all understand this, I mean, you know, if God gets on something maybe that you preach, your one service, boy, that'd be good at that preacher's conference, you know? So I just remember that. And then something else, oh, that'd be good at the preacher's conference, you know? And so I never really got any, you know, leadership on any of those sermons that I thought, you know, y'all would enjoy, that I would enjoy preaching, you know? So I got serious about it a few weeks back and really began to seek God's leadership on what he would have me to share with you guys and this church. And you know, gentlemen, we're facing a real dilemma over the word of God. Like I said, I don't want to be a source of contention, but I really have, I know all, everybody here, everyone here wants to be obedient to God. They want to proclaim the Word of God. It is the Word of God that, you know, we preach Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. It's what we live. It's what we want to instill in our people. But you also understand that the Word of God is under tremendous attack. in the day in which we live. And when I first got saved and when God called me to preach, there wasn't even an issue about what the Word of God was. I mean, it was just, we had a standard in our church. It was our King James Bible and That's what, I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, got saved in a Southern Baptist church, and that was the standard. That was back in the late 1960s. So, I have seen such a digression from that standard that we held long ago and had been one that has been held for so long. that I just want to share some things that I have gleaned along the way. Because all of us deal with this issue at some point in our life. I mean, if you have people come into your church, Brother Jimmy, I know you have to deal with, well, what version do we use? What Bible version do we use that we say is the word of God? We deal with it at our church. And there's a tremendous attack upon the Word of God from, without. An unbelieving world certainly has assaulted the Word of God. And if you take a stand on the Word of God, whatever you would deem it to be, they would say, you know, you're a ignoramus. You know, you're an obscurantist. You're not educated. But also from within. There's a lot of uncertainty as to what is the Word of God. I have seen this over the course of my ministry. And I guess it was probably most pronounced a few years back a kid came to me. I was teaching ninth grade Bible. Her youth pastor had, you know, Instructed her to use a new international version of the NIV and She said Mr. Gaddy you keep saying In my father's house are many mansions if it were not so I would have told you Yeah She said where is that? I want to I want to tell my mom that verse I said John I Chapter 14, 1 and 2, just go look it up. She went home and she showed her mom, didn't say that. My father's house had many rooms. Well, I thought it said mansions. Well, my Bible does say mansions. So, you understand there's some controversy here. lady in our school, her name was Miss Dorothy Zimbrick, and she was an English teacher. And boy, she was just, I mean, right down the line. She knew all the different parts of speech. She'd diagram sentences, and she was just very technical in everything that she taught in English class. And so one day I was giving a devotion among our faculty, and I always used my King James Bible, So Miss Dorothy came up to me after the devotion and she gave me a little, I was talking about arrowheads and you know, shaping kids and all this stuff. And she came up to me afterward and she said, look, here's an arrowhead. I found this arrowhead. And she said, by the way, you need to get you a real Bible. I said, does every guy have a real Bible? No, you don't. No, you don't. My Bible is based on the oldest manuscripts. So we sat down and talked about it, and I really didn't make a whole lot of progress with it because her pastor told her her Bible, which was the NIV, was based on the oldest manuscripts. And then I remember one time Ms. Amorian came in, and she said, you know, honey, I had an unusual situation today that happened in class. She said, I called on a child to read from Genesis. And she kept saying, Miss Gaddy, I can't read that. And she said, sure you can read it. It's the word of God. You can read it. And she said, no, I can't. And Maureen kept insisting, you can read it. Go ahead and read it. She said, no, I can't. I won't read it. So she went over and looked at her Bible. And it said, and Adam had sex with Eve. And Maureen said, oh, you can't read that. Now the reason I'm saying this is because I think you understand when people come to you. And this has got to be a problem. It's certainly not just a problem with me. I mean, you have friends that come to you. You have people that come to you. Why do you defend this old Bible? And is our defense justified? I mean, are we just digging in on something just because my grandfather read it? If that is why we are digging in, there's no reason to dig in. I mean, there's got to be reasons why we defend this as the Word of God. And try to understand that throughout this country, And around this world, there is an unbelievable attack upon the Word of God so that many people today don't even know what the Word of God is. And they'll say, that's not what my version says. That's not what my Bible says. And that is becoming more and more a point of contention in the church so that we have lost our standard. in the church and people don't know what the Word of God is. And I want to tell you, listen, this has been the issue since the very beginning. All the way back to where it started in the Garden of Eden, this has been the issue. Do you remember what Eve said? Eve said, when the serpent came to her, and began to converse with her. She said, God said, neither shall we eat of, neither shall we touch it, lest we die. Well, God didn't really say, neither shall you touch it. But I'm just saying there was uncertainty in her mind as to what God really said. And she even said, lest you die. And God didn't say, lest you die. God said, ye shall surely die. She blunted. She added to the Word of God and she blunted the forcefulness of the Word of God because God did say, ye shall surely die. I'm saying there was uncertainty with Eve. And then here's the serpent coming along and saying, it shall not surely die. So from the inside, there was uncertainty. And from the outside, there was flat denial of the word of God. So do you understand that we're facing some of the same problems today? Because among our people, there's an uncertainty as to what God really says, because it's vague today. Let me just tell you a couple of things here. I've been dealing with this my whole Christian life. And as it gets worse, I dig in deeper. But I want to tell you this, y'all. Listen, I just want what's true. That's all I want. What's true? I mean, if some other version is the Word of God, then so be it. But I don't believe that, okay? All I'm interested in is what's true. Years ago, I went off to Bible college. I was excited, I was interested, and I got saved, and God had called me to preach, and it was just thrilling to be able to go to a good, solid, fundamental Bible college. I went to Tennessee Temple up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's really changed since those days, but back in those days, I remember Maria and I got to this Bible college. We came in like on a Wednesday night. We didn't really know where we were going, you know. We just got married, you know, went off to Bible college. We got married December and January. We were in college. I remember on a Wednesday night, we got there early. It's a big, big church, Holland Park Baptist Church. It's sponsored Tennessee Temple College. We got there on like a Wednesday night, and we didn't know about the time change. You know, right there at Chattanooga, you go into the Eastern time zone, so we got there early. And there was a few people there, and we thought, well, you know, it's a typical Wednesday night crowd, but we didn't know we were an hour early. So by the time church started, an hour later, the whole place was packed out. Man, this is great, you know. Choir came down Wednesday night, Brother Jimmy. Choir came down, you know. Dr. Lee Robertson was our man. He preached. He had hair high and eyeballs. I'm telling you, he really got on it, you know. And about seven people got saved on a Wednesday night. I thought I died with heaven, you know. Well, let me tell you this. At that school, there was no doubt as to what Bible we were going to use. I mean, we used the King James Bible, but you know what? In our Greek class, we used something called a Nestle's text, which comes from the critical text. I'm so glad, Brother Jimmy, you got this board up here, because I'm going to use it in just a little bit. But the Nestle's text comes from the critical text, and that's not from, the received text. Let me just show you a couple of things here. Y'all look like you're interested. Brother, can I? Oh man, I didn't really want to do this. I'll get rid of that last one for sure. Oh my, we're going to do kingdom work. But look y'all, I want to show you something here. Brother Steve, We don't want to eliminate the cross under no circumstances, but just for the moment, just to teach something here. And I even brought, Brother Jimmy, I had no idea you had a board up here. And when God laid this on my heart, I said, I need a board. I don't even have a board. But let me just show you this, y'all. This has been something that, this critical text that came along It came along in 1881, and it was called the Westcott and Hort Neutral Text. It's got some other names. Like I said, the Neutral Text is also called the Eclectic Text. Good night. What in the world does that mean? It means to pick and choose is what it means. But from this critical text, there were a couple of manuscripts. One was called Sinaiticus and the other was called Vaticanus. And over here was what was called the Received Text or the Textus Receptus if you put it in Latin. But this critical text came along And from this right here came our King James Bible. But from these right here came, first of all, the American Standard Version about 1901, the Revised Standard Version about 1950, we'll just say around 50. The New American Standard Version. The Living Bible came along. The NIV came along. The ESV. All of them are from this critical text. And from the received text, there's only that right there. So all the new versions really come from the critical text. Now the thing about this, y'all, is that there are large portions When I talk about large portions, let me just read this to you. I mean, I've got all kinds of stuff up here, and we could stay until about 1 o'clock, you know, but we're not going to. But the reason I wanted to show you this is because from Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, there are massive changes. And let me just read this to you. I mean, this was like on CNN.com. Okay, they said, well, you can't depend on that. But I'm just saying there have been lots of questions about these texts for a long period of time. And let me just tell you a couple of things. Sinaiticus, when they found it, it included two books that weren't even in the New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Aramis. from the Old Testament. They added seven books that were not even in the canon. Sinaiticus has numerous handwritten corrections made as late as 800 years after it was written. It changes range from an alteration where it has a single letter that's been inserted to whole sentences that have been inserted. But let me just tell you this, y'all. All of this is done in the name of scholarship. In other words, if you accept this critical text, which all of these versions come from the critical text, Westcott and Hart, then this is what is considered education. This is academic. This is the intellectual side. If you accept this over here, you're pretty much classified as somebody who does not study. And all in the name of academia, they have embraced this over here. Let me ask you something. Do you think people will lie to you at high levels? Do you just think that they would lie to you? Let me ask you this, have they lied to us about evolution? They have lied to us about evolution. I'm talking all the intellectuals. They have lied to us about evolution. They say we crawl down the slide. All these tremendous complex life forms with, you know, all this different diversity and complexity that we have. We weren't created by God according to them. We just happened. We understand that that is a lie. Do you believe that, I'm not trying to get political here, but do you believe that high government people will lie to us? They will lie to us. I want to tell you something, y'all. All of this right here was based in German rationalism. And they say, the oldest. This represents the oldest. Therefore, this is the best. That has been what I have heard from my earliest years after I first got saved. It's right here in my Bible. I have a Scofield Reference Bible. The oldest manuscripts are the best, and Sinaiticus, goes all the way back to about A.D. 350 and the Vaticanus goes back to around the same time. They're both Alexandrian types and they're the oldest, therefore they're the best, therefore buy into it because the oldest is the best. That's what they say. And I had to kind of get away from And let me tell you something, everybody that's my age and kind of down, and everybody that's my age and up, this is what we were taught. I went to a tremendously fundamental Baptist college, and this is what I was taught. Although we use the King James Bible, this is what we were taught. And there are large portions, additions to the Word of God that come from this critical text. But I'm just saying that I believe with all of my heart and soul that they have lied to us about this. And there are reasons. You have to get outside traditional academia in order to figure it out. I really have felt my whole Christian life, I have had an obligation to my people to do the right thing, to teach them the right thing, because as a pastor, that's my responsibility. I mean, am I going to buy into this just because everybody's done it? No, I don't want to buy into it just for that reason. I want to research it and make sure that I'm doing the right thing. I want to teach my people right. And as I began to read and try to read different sources, I found out there was some mistakes here. There were some errors because it's not necessarily that the oldest manuscript is the best manuscript. What if the oldest manuscript had been set aside because it had defects and it wasn't embraced by the people? What if that was the case? And I really believe that that was the case. Let me ask you this. Why would God Then all of us, when we study Bible doctrine, we believe in what's called the verbal plenary inspiration of the scriptures. We believe every word is inspired by God. We believe that all of the Bible is inspired by God from Genesis to Revelation. Why would God wait until 1844 and let Tischendorf find the most accurate, the most exact, the most precise in a waste can in a monastery on Mount Sinai. If that really is the case, if God was saving the best for 1880, and you can see that these versions really hadn't come along until mid-1900s, late 1900s, why would God do that? If that's true, what has it produced in our church? Do we have a holy church because of the new versions that have come along? Do we have a holy standard, a higher standard because of the new versions that have come along? I don't see it if it's there. But let me tell you a couple of things here. I know we're going to run out of time, Let me just, let me just read this verse over again. Matthew 4, 4. Man shall not live by bread alone, but listen to me, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Does that put importance on every word? Every word? That's what it says. So what if we have missing verses. What if we have missing phrases? But you see, we believe in verbal inspiration of the scripture. We believe that every word in the original manuscripts have been inspired by God. Let me show you this. Turn the page. Matthew chapter 5. Matthew chapter 5 and verse 18, you can see this. I mean, we can understand this. Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. A jot? Do you know what a jot is? A jot is really the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. A jot, the smallest letter. And the tittle is the smallest piece of a letter. This would be like equivalent to our I, this would be equivalent to a piece of a, the dot over the I, the crossing of the T, the crossing of the J. Jesus placed great emphasis on every letter. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. But beyond that, he placed great emphasis on every letter in every word and every piece of a letter in every word. So when we look in our Bible, is it open to discussion as to whether This passage ought to be here from John chapter 8 of the last verses of Mark chapter 16. Is it open for discussion? Well, let me just tell you this, gentlemen. I mean, how did I settle this thing? I mean, I wasn't going to just go along with just because people were saying, well, this is what you ought to believe. I didn't want to do that. But I have a love for history. I absolutely love history. And by the way, y'all, we got a little time here. You know, history is his story. It is his story. Everything happened either B.C. before Christ or A.D. in the year of our Lord. Everything is centered around him. He is the focus. He is the object. It's all about him. It is his story. But you know, today, it's before the common era. And today, it's the common era. Oh, they've taken that away. You look at the latest and greatest textbooks, and they've eliminated B.C. and they've eliminated A.D. because that's the way the world thinks. They certainly don't want everything to be centered around Jesus. Let me just tell you this, y'all. As I studied this, and as I love history, and I study about history because so much of it, even before the cross, has all of these wonderful nations, and it gives us information from history about those nations. And when you study the New Testament, you can see the history of the Christian church. When I began to study this, I learned about a kingdom called the Byzantine Empire. My goodness gracious. Do you know what this received text, this textus receptus, really is also? I mean, there's a lot of synonyms for it, and people like to study it. I know you're looking out there. It's a good night, brother Harold. I mean, we're pretty good to go eat, you know? And you're giving us this big dose of who knows what, you know? But the thing about it is that you've got the received text, you've got the textus receptus, you've got the Byzantine text, the ecclesiastical text, the traditional text, all these are synonyms for what is known as the majority text. The majority text, ladies and gentlemen, listen, 95% of all the manuscripts that we have are of the Byzantine nature. the Byzantine text type, which is the majority text. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, from which come the critical texts. They represent just a very small fraction. I'm just saying that Almighty God has given us the majority text. It's 95% of all the manuscripts, and it is of the Byzantine text, and it is where we get our King James Version. Let me just tell you this, y'all. Let me show you one other thing. I really want to show you several other things, but I know y'all are hungry. But listen, listen to me, okay? I'm not a real good artist here. But the Byzantine Empire was right in here. This would be Greece, kind of extended over this way. Antioch would be over here. They were called Christians first at Antioch. These people, and I learned this independently. Nobody was really talking about this. I mean, these people, the Byzantine Empire, they were the keepers of the Greek text. And they They wrote over and over, they would copy and re-copy it. That's why most of these texts that come from the Byzantine text type, that's why they are late date. That's why they're AD 800 or even later, AD 1200. Because people used them and they revered them and they re-copied them and they used them so much they wore them out. It's not what happened with the Sinaiticus and not what happened with the Vatican. It's the Alexandrian text. But I'm just saying that in this region right here, you have all the churches. You have Ephesus and Philippi and Thessalonica. You have Corinth over here. You have Antioch over here. All of this is where the apostles were. They weren't down here in Egypt where they discovered that. Alexandrian text. Or over here in the Vatican where they discovered Vaticanus. This is where the majority of our texts were written. And this is where our King James Version is based on these right here. Let me just tell you a couple of things and then I'll close. I know I've taxed your patience here maybe a little bit. Let me tell you, I'm a firm believer in the blessing of God on something. And longevity, whenever you look at how God has blessed our King James Bible. Because all the way back, I mean you can go back to early England, God blessed This old version right here, which comes from this majority of text, and it doesn't come from the new text types that have been recently discovered. I'm just saying, when you look at all the great preachers, ladies and gentlemen, look at them. I mean, from Spurgeon. I revere Spurgeon. I really do. Man, to me, he truly was the prince of preachers. and you can look at Whitfield, and Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards, and all of those guys that God blessed, and the first great awakening, and the second great awakening, and Moody, and Penny, and all of these guys that we read about in history, they used this right here. God blessed it. You'd say, but Brother Harold, we don't speak in Shakespearean English anymore, Elizabethan English. We don't do that. My granddaddy didn't either, OK? But God, neither did Spurgeon, OK? But God blessed it. And all I'm seeing today is slaughter and the butcher, butchery of the Word of God. Let me just read this to you. This is in the Ebonics Bible. Oh, you'd like to hear this one, huh? If you just want to see, you say, but Harold, you know, we're not going to pick up an Ebonics Bible. You understand it is denigrated to such a degree that some people would believe this is the Word of God. Lord's Prayer, you want to hear it? Try not to throw up. Yo big daddy upstairs, you be chillin', so be yo hood. You be sayin' it, I be doin' it. In this here hood and yo's, give me some eats. And cut me some slack, bud. I don't even wanna read the next one. Don't be pushin' me into no jive and keep them crips away. Cause you be the man, straight up. I mean, you understand The Word of God is being butchered because there's no standard. There's no standard anymore. Men don't get up and say, thus saith the Lord God. This is what God says. We were talking about doctrinal truth. Thank God we can find our doctrinal truth right here in the Word of God. We have something we can preach. We can proclaim. It is here. Let me just close with this illustration. One thing, and then this will be it. You understand our Constitution is a revered document, really. In the United States, if it's constitutional, then it's OK. If it's unconstitutional, according to the Supreme Court, then we can't do it. But let me just tell you how much emphasis has been placed on the Constitution. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution was changing one word. They changed the word from 21 to 18. Because prior to that time, young men were going to Vietnam. They were dying in rice paddies over there. They were giving their life for their country. And they couldn't vote because they were not 21 years old. They were only 18 years old. So Congress looked at this and they said, you know, This needs to be changed. And so Congress took a two-thirds vote of Congress, signed by the president, had to be ratified by three-fourths of the states in our country. They all changed one word from 21 to 18. One word. But do you understand today? with something that is far more precious and far more revered. Heaven and earth shall pass away, God said, but my word shall never pass away, not one fiddle. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. They are playing loose and free with the Word of God, so people don't even know what it is. As I challenge you gentlemen, You hear Richardson, thank God you got a pastor that stands on the word of God. Stand on the word of God, not just because it's some archaic book. I'm telling you, the intellectuals have lied to us about what is the best text. And there are some renowned men of God. that no differently. You ought to read behind John Burgundy. You ought to read behind Edward F. Hills. You can read what they say. I'm telling you, these men are renowned in their own right. I'm talking about scholars at Oxford, scholars at Yale. I'm talking about men that know what they're talking about. They revere the King James Bible, and they revere the Byzantine text. Stand by, gentlemen. preach it as the Word of God, proclaim it, love it, live it, exalt Christ as you proclaim God's Word. Father, we come to you and God, we pray that you would help us. What I know among every man who has been called by you, the struggle with Hearing so many say a certain thing. And yet God, you have given us your precious and holy word. And God, we pray that we could preach Jesus from your precious and holy word. God, thank you for Richardson Baptist Church. Thank you for these devoted, dedicated, children of God and this beloved pastor. Bless them, Lord, as they seek to reach men and women and boys and girls for Jesus Christ. And we pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.
Battle over Versions
Sermon ID | 82413183180 |
Duration | 44:11 |
Date | |
Category | Special Meeting |
Bible Text | Matthew 4:1-4 |
Language | English |
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