The Entirety Of Your Word

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the largest protestant denomination in the United States. What many people do not know is that it experienced for some thirty years a similar ideological struggle that the Republican Party faces today. Conservatives looked around its convention and did not recognize the landscape; its seminaries and denominational agencies had become filled with moderates and liberals. A must read book, the seminal work done on this struggle, was written by Judge Paul Pressler titled A Hill on Which to Die: One Southern Baptist’s Journey. I will not go into to the whole story and how it turns out, but how did it start?

In a nutshell it began over Scripture.

Are God’s Word and His promises trustworthy? While the SBC controversy began over the Book of Genesis the fight over the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility have been in question for at least the last two centuries. There is neither time nor space to defend the Bible’s inerrancy so let me see what the Bible says of itself. That is what many critics claim; the Bible itself makes no claim to inerrancy.

Maybe not directly but it certainly infers it.

    “The entirety of Your word is truth, and every one of Your righteous judgments endures forever.” (Psalm 119:160)

If all of God’s word, the sum of all if it, is true then there certainly cannot be any errors in it. I’m just sayin’!

Why would God want us to know that His Word is without error? The Apostle Paul gives the reason:

    “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

We can live our Christian lives with a full faith and confidence that Scripture is from God and for His people.

Paul also taught that we can interpret Scripture without error down to individual letters in each word:

    “Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘And to your Seed,’ who is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16)

Okay, so the Apostle Paul, who was a man trying to start churches and spread the gospel, says that. You got anyone with more authority?

Sure, how about Jesus Christ Himself?

    “For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.” (Matthew 5:18)

What we can take away from these verses through deductive reasoning is that if this were not true it would be easy to prove false. And if the Bible was in error itself would be false.

Here is another strong argument from history; of all the ancient documents including the great philosophers of whom no one argues authenticity or inerrancy, Scripture has fewer years between extant copies of the original manuscripts than any major ancient document.

So what does all of this mean?

It means I can trust my Bible to be the true word of God from God.

It means I can trust.

Trust = Faith

Do you have faith in the entirety of God’s Word?

No?

Perhaps you’re not reading it enough?

In Christ
Dave
Ps. 37:4

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    Copyright © 2009 David Jeffers

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