Eternal Approach

“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3)

The church must be warned about the teaching of Thought Preservation.

This is an error that has been consistently pushed within both Evangelical and Fundamental universities which rejects the doctrine of the word-for-word preservation of scripture.

This thinking promotes the belief that perfect, word-for-word inspiration took place in the originals (the autographs); while also claiming that those same, exact words were lost in the copies.

It also promotes the idea that only God’s thoughts were preserved in the copies! Some say that the “essence of truth” has been preserved — but not the words.

Which means, that the Lord was only concerned with Preserving His actual written words, and punctuation in the originals.

Translation

Keeping these thoughts in mind, let’s move on to the last aspect of this Preservation process.

Translation is where men faithfully carry over God’s words from Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic into another language. In this process, the translators should use a perfect copy of the original language and bring over the same words and same word forms into another language — such as English — by the Formal or word-for-word translation technique.

This involves at least 4 major concerns:

• The Text: It must be a perfect copy of the original
• The Translator: He must be a believer that accepts the verbal inerrancy of the scriptures. And who has a thorough command of the languages to properly translate.
• The Technique: Translation must be by the Formal-Equivalence method. As opposed to Dynamic Equivalence. This is not to create a commentary but a faithful word-for-word translation from the original language. Believing that interpretation must be left to the final reader guided by the Holy Spirit.
• The Theology: This involves a rejection of Higher Criticism. The word of God must be accepted as God’s supernaturally produced and protected book. Every word is to be accepted as vital. Nothing is to be added. Nothing is to be subtracted.

The Replacement of God’s Word

It is disturbing that most believers are unable to grasp what I have just said.

Because most have never been taught this basic information in either their Christian schools or their local churches. And others have just neglected this study.

Most Christians casually accept the Bible that they have been told is acceptable. Or which their church uses. Or which their Christian college promotes. Or which the evangelists or authors they follow suggest.

To be clear, this is not a problem caused by lack of intelligence.

This is a problem caused by ignorance.

By ignorance, I mean it is about IGNORING things. It is about making a choice to ignore what God has promised in His word. And to ignore the clear testimony of history regarding texts and translations.

This ignorance is caused by popular Christian scholars. It is caused by men who know full well the significance of this information; by men who have even fought to suppress it. (We will talk more about the reason behind this in future posts.)

The Ecumenical Push

Suffice it to say for now, that the general move of the Evangelical church toward deeper ecumenical compromise cannot be achieved without first removing the Spirit’s ability to cleanse and purge the church.

This power to cleanse and purge the church is found in God’s specific words.

“Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” (John 17:17)

“Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.” (John 15:3)

The more uncertainty that is created about what God has specifically said allows churches to focus less on doctrine and “divisive” truth and more on big initiatives, large programs, and cross-denominational outreaches. Which creates a breakdown of biblical separation.

Which ultimately is about the loss of separation of truth from error and light from darkness.

The Absence of Teaching in Seminaries

What is worse, is that those who are trained in biblical Greek and Hebrew or who are taught textual history in seminaries or Christian universities are often not taught about the Hebrew Masoretic Text or the Greek Textus Receptus. If anything, they receive merely a passing or dismissive nod to these texts.

I have read the testimonies of men who obtained their degrees from schools such as Dallas Theological Seminary. Where they completed their undergraduate and later Graduate studies in Bible, in Greek, and in Hebrew while never receiving training in the  textual foundation of the Received Text.

What would cause institutions of higher learning to blatantly ignore the Received Text which is the foundation of the great Bibles of history? Great works such as the Tyndale Bible, the Coverdale Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the King James Bible?

Why is the defense of the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Greek Received Text abandoned? Why is this defense left to the “less-educated” men and women in the pews? Why do the so-called scholars ignore these things that have been so overwhelmingly established in history?

Within Christian schools today a careful decision has been made to denigrate or just disregard the texts that have been the foundation of the great Bibles from the early days of the church until today.

All for the purpose of replacing the pure and preserved words of God with the counterfeit words that Westcott and Hort revealed to the world at the end of the 1800s.

To Be Continued . . .