Can I trust the Bible I have to be God’s word?

Everyone, welcome to the cultivate podcast through the Grove church. I'm Charlie

Lofton, the lead pastor there, and I'm here with my friend and partner, Mark

Freeman. Hey, yo, what's up, dude? It's all good, man. I've

enjoyed this series that we've been doing, doing last couple of episodes. I

hope you have been enjoying it. We've been kind of

answering, kind of wrestling through some questions about the

authority. Where does authority come from? It's kind of where we started. Where does authority

come from and where does truth come from? Ultimate comes

from God revealed in Jesus, revealed through his word.

And that is what we believe, that truth is found in

God's word. And then we spent some time, last time just kind of building on

that a little bit, just kind of talking about what the Bible says about itself,

about does it claim to have this sort of authority.

And really, I think we ended up spending some fairly impromptu time, it feels

like to me just kind of talking about what is it like to even

wrestle with that idea of me

wanting to have authority versus really yielding authority to

God through his word and

ultimately kind of coming to the conclusion still that we really believe

that God's word is

true and that's where truth is. So we need to be really

careful about how we interpret it because that is

the Christian's ultimate source for truth about the world, about

God, about ourselves. So I want to be faithful to

submit to that authority, and I would be faithful to be a diligent student of

the scriptures, not with an arrogance that says, I've got everything figured out

always, but constantly learning to understand

what God's word really says and what it means when it says it.

And so we've been kind of back and forth and on that for a

couple of episodes now. But I feel like we've got one

more really big question left and probably

100 other small ones that would take three years worth of

podcasts to answer. But I feel like we got one more big one. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so, too. Because if you're going to say

that the Bible has that kind of authority, which I kept thinking about this the

last episode, man, I've always loved C. S.

Lewis. His statement, don't, don't

come at me with this. Jesus was just a good teacher

because of the claims he made about himself. He didn't leave us

that option. Right? He is either a crazy man, he's an

absolute liar, or he is Lord. And I had

never thought about that with what the Bible says about itself,

but that it also doesn't leave us any room to just treat it like a

normal book because of what it says about itself. We

have to come to it and decide either it is authoritative or

it's nothing. There's no in between.

No, just, hey, this is just some good ideas, right?

So anyway, I'd never thought about that, but it does. It begs the

question. So we're saying a lot about this,

and we're giving it a really high place in our

life and our church and our decision making and what we do

and the way we see things. So how did the Bible.

I know it's a bunch of books. Everybody like, how do you know

this? And we've decided. You said scripture, but there are a lot

of ancient spiritual texts. Right?

Why this group of books and this group of authors?

Where did that come from? How does that all work?

That is an amazing question. And that is definitely what I feel like the big

question is, which is if we say that scripture

is inspired by God, and this

happens 2000 years ago in the case of Paul and

earlier for the stuff in the Old Testament, and now here

I am, thousands of years later in a completely

different language, reading an english

translation of the Bible. Can I trust

that these are the words that God inspired?

Because the word that we talked about in two, Timothy

316, it says that all scripture is God breathed. It's

sourced by him. And then we talked about that other verse that says that combining

spiritual thoughts and spiritual words and that Paul's talking

about. Even if I just wrote it down, you better make sure you

believe that these words

that were written down by a varying group of authors.

If we believe that those words were sourced by God,

what level of trust can I have

that these words are those words?

And because the doctrine of inspiration, this is

kind of a theological deal. We're kind of talked about inspiring that when we say

inspired by God, we don't mean

I felt something and so I wanted to write it. Not inspired like he's

a cheerleader, but a deeper inspiration as source

and life. And so the pretty

well used definition for what inspiration

means is that essentially that the Bible, again, comes from

God. And if it comes from God, it's completely

trustworthy. We use words like inerrant or infallible,

which can feel overwhelming. But if we can say that if the

words come from God, God doesn't lie. God doesn't make mistakes.

So the words that God said, he said them without

error. And so what

he told the author to write, and again, the definition, obviously is

superintend. He kind of superintended the author to make sure

that what the author wrote would be without error

coming from God. And so

essentially, that idea, inspiration, really

only applies to the original manuscript

that they wrote it on, because inspiration happened at the moment of

authorship. He inspired the process by which

the book was written. So Moses writes it out, Samuel writes it

out. Isaiah writes it out, mark writes it out. Not

you. Different Mark, Paul,

John, Peter. When they wrote it out, they were inspired

by God. That was a God breathed moment. And so it was

true of the words they wrote.

We don't have that. We have something very

different. So the question is, can

I trust what I have? And so, really, this is

kind of how I have historically answered this question.

In order for me to trust God's word,

the Bible that I have, I guess we'll say it that way. I can

100% trust God's word. Can I trust the Bible? I have to

be God's word. There's two things that I have

to believe. One, I have to believe in the doctrine of

inspiration. I have to believe that the Bible is God

breathed and that God is capable,

capable, capable, desiring

and did use a human

person to create something error free.

Humans make mistakes, and so if you're going to use the human author, it's going

to have mistakes. Do I believe that God is capable of using

a sinful, mistake filled person to do something error

free? Can God work

through somebody to write something like that?

And I think the answer to that question is yes, of course he is

capable of doing that. God is capable of working through somebody, that

everything that they say for a given time period is 100%

true. That's what prophets do. I

think I can do it for one sentence.

My birth name is Charles Emmett Lofton.

Sure, I'm a sinful person, but I am capable for a short windows of time

of saying man. I'm calling you Emmett from now on.

I think I prefer Charles. If you're going to go that direction.

I've used Chuck a lot. You can call me C. Emmett Lofton. That's my

lawyer. Uh, where were we?

Oh, yes, sorry. And so if God gets involved, then I'm capable

for a particular period of time, for speaking truth even longer, as long as

God wants to. And so that's the doctrine of inspiration. Do I believe

that God is capable of doing that, and do I believe that

God did that? That's faith. Step one,

faith. Step two is, do I believe

that same God

can and did

superintend oversee the process by which it went

from? Paul wrote it

on a piece of papyrus, sent it to

Galatia, and

2000 years later, what

I have communicates the same thing.

Do I trust that God oversaw that process? So there

really are two significant moments of faith,

and so you can go in and

analyze the process, which I'm more than happy to do.

I've given day long seminars on this topic. I can talk

about this for anywhere from two to 400

minutes, depending on what the situation calls

for. Do you have 400 minutes? 400 minutes. That was a

weirdly specific number. It really was, and I'm trying. It's not divisible by 60,

it's not hours. I did it on purpose because I'm an

idiot.

But really, no matter what I say, whatever

we say about the authorship, and whatever we say about how

the particular books got selected, whatever we say about

the process by which the books were copied, whatever it is we say

about the way the Bible has been translated,

you can always give back the answer. But if humans are

involved, there is the potential and capacity for

sin and error. That is absolutely, 100%

true. There's nothing I can say to convince you that I can show

you without, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the element of human

error has been eliminated because

there has been some human error that has gotten

involved. I wouldn't say that. And even if I

could, I can't prove

it. And so ultimately, before we even get into

the details,

really, both of these things come from a trust

and faith in God. Do I believe God inspired them? And

do I believe that same God that inspired them would protect the word that he

inspired? Does that make sense?

Yeah, I love it because it's just the

reality of faith is one of those things that we want to

get to a place where it doesn't require it. Right? But God has not given

us that. At some point, you're going to hit a place where

you're going to have to go, all right, I trust something I can't

see. Does God want me

to have a trustworthy

translation of his word? Is that what God

wants? And was he willing to do

what had happened, to do what was necessary to make that

happen? It's not just simply

an act. It really, at its core, is a thing of faith. And so then

I go to all these things that I learn, and I'm

blinded, but I'm informed by that

when I read all these things about all the processes that

happen to make this happen, I look at it

through a lens of this seems like what a

trustworthy God would do. So we can take these in any

order I'll let you pick.

When you think about this process, which is the one that kind of hits

you, is it how the books got picked, how they got copied?

Translation, which is the one that's kind of like. That's the one that I kind

of wonder about how they got picked, probably. Yeah. Because

it seems like. And some were picked and some weren't picked. Right.

There were people making those decisions, and it seems like

that's where error could have entered the easiest. Right?

Maybe. So let's think about it

logistically and historically. While the

apostles are alive, all the way up until, I think, John died,

probably around the year 90 AD,

and revelation being the last book that was written, all the way up until

the point that the apostles were alive, scripture was still

being written. And so there was no point, while the apostles

were still alive, that there was a point in which, okay,

we're done, now we're done.

There's no means by which one could say, okay, this is all the

things post Jesus that are Bible

scripture. And so then you write a letter and you send it

to know.

The people in Ephesus and Thessalonica have no idea, but

apparently what's happening is these letters are being copied,

really because of Paul's instruction to do so, you

should copy these and send them on. And so these letters

are being copied and sent to other towns. In other

towns. So Ephesus is getting to read what he said to

Colossi and vice versa, and all these letters are being circulated

amongst each other. And then as

the gospel is expanding beyond just these initial

cities where Paul was preaching, beyond Israel,

into kind of the roman cities kind of

surrounding it, and just kind of expands beyond,

these letters are just being distributed widely.

And so in addition to that, some other versions of the story

of Jesus, or gospels, as we call them, are also going out there. And people

who aren't apostles, like people like Timothy, right,

people who were Peter's disciples, John's disciples, they're

also writing letters to other churches and to each other, and

all they're spreading around. And so there are all these letters and

gospels, some of which we know about, some of which

they're known, but a lot know, most people don't know

about. They're being circulated widely,

and there's no denominations. And regardless

of what the Catholic Church wants us to believe, there really was

not a uniform worldwide

authority structure by which

it was very clear who's in charge. And this is

exactly what we would believe. What would happen would be, from time to time,

situations would come up, they would start challenging whether or not

Jesus. People would start challenging whether or not Jesus was fully God, which was really

never the debate. The biggest debate the church has ever really

had, were mostly around, was Jesus actually a real

person, or was he just God pretending to be? Now,

there was one, a controversy called the aryan controversy, not to be

confused with A-R-Y-A-N Hitler,

A-R-I-N Aryan, a guy named

Arius, kind of more of a predecessor to modern day Jehovah's Witnesses,

who did believe that Jesus was just a human.

And so there would be all of these controversies. And when these

controversies would arise, kind of the leaders in all of these different cities would come

together, and they would have a council. They started to have

these leaders in these cities would gain the title of bishop. And then

eventually, the structure by which the Catholic Church

happened, where there was kind of a bishop of bishops, the bishop of Rome kind

of existed as the bishop of bishops. All of this starts to happen.

And so most of these things were governed

city by city until there kind of became a

growing need to bring an

answer to these things. And so whether or

not which of these letters and gospels and books are the

authoritative ones or not really just wasn't a question

that they necessarily felt like answering. It wasn't like there was this

point at which we've got to figure this out. And really, to be able

to answer that question thoroughly is going to require a

significant amount of time to happen for these things to

fully circulate amongst the world. And so

what happened was that there was a controversy

where a heresy develops. A guy named

Pelagius, he develops this heresy. Pelagius? Yeah, I

know. He's the worst. Not plagiarist. He wasn't

stealing other people's work. Pelagius, anyways.

And he put together what he considered to be a canon,

which was a. I think it was like excerpts from the

Gospel of Mark and some of Paul's letters, and

through a select view of these things, was able to

develop a fairly works centered

approach to Christianity.

And so this was needed to be put down. So

he is spreading out there. This is what we call. This is the New

Testament. And then like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

whoa. So then the bishops and the leaders are like,

we need to put a stop to this. And so there were two

councils, one around 393, called

the Council of Hippo, which is the name of a town,

not a large water mammal. But did

their high school mascot, was it a hippo, though? It would had to have been.

That would be awesome. Maybe just call yourself. Have we missed that? The hippopotamuses.

Do you know any towns? The high schools? That sounds

like a great topic for. When we start a school.

First we have to rename the town. We have to rename the

town Hippo. Wow.

It was around 393 AD, and then the council of Carthage four

years later, 397. And so what they did

was this was. And again, it was built out of a

concern, and the question

was, what are the

authoritative texts? And

their decision making process really came down to three different ideas.

Does it have apostolic authority? Did an

apostle write it, or did someone under the immediate care of

an apostle write it? Not a disciple of

Paul after Paul was dead, but a

companion of Paul. So Paul was kind of with Luke when

he wrote the gospel. Mark was with Peter

when Mark wrote his gospel. Or did an

apostle write it like Matthew, like John, like Paul, like Peter?

And so does it have apostolic authority? Is

it theologically consistent with each other and with the Old

Testament? And does it have

universal appeal and acceptance?

And so the third one, I'll explain this way pretty easily. You can imagine a

book that Paul would write to Galatia where he's like,

tell Fred to cut it out. He's an idiot. He needs to

stop. Jim, sorry for whatever

Fred's doing. Please hang in there. Love, Paul.

I mean, that's really a powerful letter that Fred

really needs to listen to. But it is not universal in its

nature. Right. And then there are going to be some

book letters that were probably written, or gospels that were probably written that the

president, this is good, not great, and probably didn't feel

compelled to copy, or they did. It was just kind of like, hey, this is

kind of interesting. You should probably read this. But if

it's God breathed, you would expect it to have a

certain intangible quality to it

and also a universal nature to it.

Probably the one that is probably most on the fence when it comes to that

is Philemon, which seems to be addressing a very specific issue

with a very specific guy. But the principles in there

about freedom and kindness and treating one another with respect and

dignity are still universal enough. They include it.

Second Timothy is a little bit like that. Right. There's just some of these things,

like maybe galatians even, right? There's some of these that

are kind of like, this is definitely addressing a very specific situation,

but even still, there's a universal appeal to it. There's a

universal quality to it. So there's an apostle involved. The

theology is consistent, and

there's a universal nature to it. So they're debating all these things, and it

was a debate. There were some things that were involved. I mean, James seems a

little different than some of the other ones. It got debated a lot. Revelation is

just weird. It got know there are some ones

that there was some conversation about it. And

ultimately both of those councils came to the

list of what we would call the New Testament. And it really wasn't until the

second one, the council of Carthage, and they had a follow up a few years

later, that it really just kind of felt like for the first time,

the universal church at the time, the catholic church at the time,

said, these are the books.

And if you want to say

it was about politics and mean between the

established church and these cults and heresies that were

sprouting out. So that's either a good thing or a bad thing. I can't say

no. It had nothing to do with power and

politics. Of course it did, because I don't want cult leaders

and heretics to have power.

And so now we have to trust some people that probably

did rightly have mixed motives,

and we also have to trust a God that superintends it. But to

me, we've got people who are genuinely, both

culturally and time wise, significantly closer to

the timeline than we are,

regardless of mixed motives. Wouldn't their primary

motive be when you're a person and you say that you're a bishop

and you got a whole bunch of them, and our primary mission here

is to figure out which one of these

books are sourced by God. And if

we say it, then what we're saying to the world with confidence is,

this is from God. I don't know these

guys. Two people I

might be worried about three people, maybe, but this number, that level of

accountability. I don't know how you feel when you teach.

I get nervous every time because people are. When I

get up there and talk, they're thinking, this dude's about to tell me what God

thinks. That's

scary. I can only imagine even

again, even if these guys have mixed motives in, there has to

have been a significant fear

of what would happen if people who say they represent God

claim something is from God, but they really don't believe it, but they do it

because they think it gives them some power. I'm just not in on

that. Does that make sense?

And so then there really has not been any real challenge

to that in the over 1600 years. Since then,

there's some famous things like that. Martin Luther said that he didn't particularly care for

the book of James, he's probably not the first

person to say that, and he's certainly not the last person to say that.

People have wondered about revelation. They wondered about it

then, people still wonder about it now. Right. It's

saying it's very normal and natural to feel like one or two books may stick

out from the rest. But there's never really been any significant

challenge to that as the collective works. And so there's some

books that refer to as the apocrypha, which is different than the books that

are in between. In the Old New Testament, there's some other

books

that didn't make it in, but most

of them were just second generation books. They're not

bad books, necessarily. They're just second gen. Right. And it's

like, we're not going to include those. Doesn't make those books

bad anymore. And it is bad if you quote a

Wayne Grudom theology book to somebody or an Andy

Stanley leadership book, doesn't make them bad. They don't

feel like they have that same level of authority and

quality. Any follow up questions? Any of that? I know that was

very speechy. No, but it was very helpful. Yeah.

And so then in addition to that, then there's a process by which these things

are getting copied.

And again, there is an overwhelming

amount of texts,

like old manuscripts, old greek manuscripts of

New Testament letters. An overwhelming number. Overwhelming

even people who are not inclined to

believe the Bible as being inspired by God would say

there is probably more textual evidence. We

probably have a higher level of confidence in

that the texts have been copied authentically, and we have

enough of them to know. Okay, well, this one is a little bit different than

this, but we got so many of them to compare. We got 20 that say

this and one that says this. This is clearly what was meant. This is

just a mistake somebody made. They just skipped over

a word, or they added a word, or a word got

misspelled here. There's so many different copies that there

is just an overwhelmingly high level of confidence

that the manuscripts themselves are the same. And there's some great examples of

this. You ever heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? So there was a time when

the earliest copy of the book of Isaiah that

we had was a few hundred years after Jesus

died. And so then there's certain parts of Isaiah that were

just, like, talking

about that, talk about Jesus. It seemed like

he's talking about him very specific. He's going to be like this. He's going to

be like this. This is going to happen. This is going to happen. And it

was a very common belief all the way up until the moment of the Dead

Sea Scrolls, which is getting in the 19 hundreds.

That somebody had written. They wrote that in, they

wrote that in post Jesus. But then in the discovery

of these Dead Sea Scrolls,

a copy of Isaiah that predates Jesus was found, and it was

found to be almost identical to the book of Isaiah that

we had, and very much had

those Jesus centered passages, word for word, the same.

And there are just a lot of stories like that. You would think at

some point there would be some copy somewhere that would emerge of something that would

make you think, we missed this. You can tell this whole

thing, this is all bad, but there's just a high

level of confidence and there are a couple of stories,

a couple of things that are in your New Testament

that people still have some question marks about the story of the woman

caught in adultery without sin. Cast the first stone,

the great commission at the end of Mark where it says, hey, you're going to

see different. Drink poison and have snakes. People like

question whether or not that was a late ad and not part of the

original. But if you take all of those out,

if you take out, hey, he who was out sin, cast the first

stone, take it out, it doesn't exist.

Do we know less about the character of Jesus? That's just

another story of a pretty consistent character

trait of Jesus. And you take the great

commission out of Mark, it's still in Matthew, still

in Luke, still in acts, which it's still

there. It's still, oh, but the thing

about the snakes, the thing about the snakes is widely

misunderstood. It doesn't say that everyone is going to get bit by a snake. It

says, one of the signs of the power of the gospel will be some people

will get bit by snakes and won't die. Which in fact happened,

like 15 years. Later to Paul in Molten, it was recognized, right?

I mean, it did happen. Doesn't mean it's going to happen to you today. Doesn't

mean you should have snakes in your service, doesn't mean you should drink poison in

your service. Just because it's been misinterpreted doesn't mean it's. But

anyway, you get rid of that, there

isn't anything lost.

And so I believe that, again, even the people

who are the most critical of God's word have a high level

of confidence in it. Again, they would say, hey,

if it's God, we should have 100%

level of confidence. 99.9 isn't good

enough. Well, let's just say, let's imagine a

hypothetical where every copy, every

manuscript of every New Testament book we ever saw

were exactly the same. You know what people would

say then? Conspiracy theory.

Too perfect. It's fake. It's as fake because it's not

possible for this to be true. So in

the realm of realistic, you would expect, if

God is superintending the process, you would expect a

super high level, 99.99% of

accuracy, and you would expect there to be a widespread

number of manuscripts that were preserved. That's what you would expect, and that is what

you have. And the last thing that I think that is

incredibly important. I know this is more speechy than normally we do this.

Some people say, I can't trust my english translation because it's a little bit

like the game of telephone. It was written in Greek,

and then it was translated into Latin, and then it was translated into

German, and then it was translated into English. Well, all

of those things are true, except they're not in a dotted line. It

was translated from Greek to Latin, and it was

translated from Greek to German, but it was not translated

from Latin to German. It was translated from Greek into German. And

all of the english translations we have, every one of them were

translated directly from the greek and hebrew

manuscripts that they had at the time.

Every one of them. There is some debate about whether or not

maybe one book in the King James

was translated from the Latin. There's a latin

version out there called the septuagint, which we're just kind of nerding here for a

little bit that whether or not that was used for some of

the King James. But

these are all direct translations, and they're

all going to be very different from each other because they have different approaches. Some

are going to be highly more literal. Some are going to intentionally use higher

church language. Some of them are going to just be more casual in the way

that they're written. But everybody who undertakes

this, undertakes it with, I want to be faithful to this.

Well, you're saying that nowhere, ever and anytime

anybody's ever inserted their own political ideology

into a translation. I would never say that.

But in the same way that we have a voluminous number

of

manuscripts, we also have

a wide variety of scholarship and scholars

and translations to which one person having an

agenda wouldn't last very long. Right. So

overwhelming. Right. Because there are way too many people looking at it being like,

that's not how that word is translated. And

I believe unintentional errors that have been made in

translation over the years are constantly being

corrected. And so we are

constantly refining the process, constantly getting better and

better greek manuscripts and constantly getting better and

better translations.

But over, above and all of that,

do we trust a God in the process?

So to me, there's plenty of reason to be confident

in the process as it's understood. I think I can trust

this as a reliable representation. But on

top of that and in that is I trust God

wants me to have his word.

Any follow up questions there?

I think if I did, I would send us down another rabbit trail.

Well, I appreciate you at least listening. It wasn't a rant, I don't guessing, but

it's a pretty well not rehearsed.

It's a thing that's deep in me. It's something that really has mattered to

me over the years. I spent a lot of time in

my college years and in the years immediately after that, really studying that

and understanding, because there was a time when it's a pretty big question people were

asking. I think most of the questions people are asking now

really are kind of what we talked

about last time. Can I really trust the authority

that this has when it competes against

what I want to believe or what

we want to believe as a society? I think

that's most of the question. It's really not about whether or not

the divine nature of the transcription process or the translation

of the Latin Vulgate and the Septuagint and all these things. I mean,

those aren't the questions that people have, but I just think it's important

just for people to be able to hear it. And if you do have that

question, you can feel confident. And

honestly, I would be like, if you really do have more questions on this,

I'm available. I'm not trying to talk anybody's ear off

for 400 minutes,

but if you need an extra four or five minutes, I would be glad to

keep talking to you. So please just let me know. You can email me, Charlie,

at the grovechurch.org. We can talk about this all you want, any questions you

have. And Abigail, who's over here running the cameras, I know she's

probably, over the course of the last 2030 minutes, probably has 15

questions. Have you already texted them to me? Oh,

great. She's already texting me some, so that's going to be great. So thanks

for being here. Thanks for joining us. And I really do hope that it says,

strengthened your faith. And to the degree that has had you asking

questions, I hope you'll ask them and you can do that. By again by emailing

me. Or we can just connect on a Sunday. You can find everything you need

to know about us at the grovechurch.org slash Connect. Whether you're local

or away, you can join us in person or stream us online. Connect

with us. We would love to hear from you Mark, again, thanks for being here

and being a part of this. Thank you for being a part of this and

we'll see you soon. Have a blessed day.