Scripture

What the Bible is, and how it is read here: plainly, in context, letter for letter.

32 questions answered, showing 16 on page 1 of 2. About this doctrine · All topics

• Whosoever WillDid Paul write the book of Hebrews?Whosoever Will, The Book With No Name: The citation formula is the strongest single tell, and it weighs heavily against Paul. When Paul quotes the Old Testament, he writes “it is written,” gegraptai, thirty-four times across his undisputed letters. Hebrews quotes the Old Testament heavily, and it uses gegraptai as its own formula zero times. The one instance, at 10:7, sits inside the Psalm 40 quotation and is the psalmist’s phrase, not the author’s. Instead of pointing to a written record, Hebrews stages a living voice: “he saith,” “the Holy Ghost saith,” “he testifieth,” the present-tense speaker, some twenty times. At Paul’s rate the book would be expected to produce about seven instances of “it is written.” It produces none of its own. That is not a difference of degree. It is a different conception of how Scripture speaks, and it is unconscious. Paul’s two signature moves are simply absent. “In Christ,” en Christo, the phrase that carries Paul’s whole doctrine of union, occurs fifty-two times in his undisputed letters and zero times in Hebrews. “Justify,” dikaioo, the verb at the center of Romans and Galatians, occurs twenty-five times in Paul and zero times in Hebrews. A writer forgets a theme. He does not forget his own grammar of salvation.
• Whosoever WillDo the hundreds of thousands of variants in New Testament manuscripts mean the Bible is corrupted?Whosoever Will, A Mile of Witnesses: You will hear the numbers turned the other way. There are hundreds of thousands of variations in the manuscripts. It sounds devastating until you ask the person to read them. Most are nothing: a slip of the pen, a word order, a spelling. And here is what the objection hides: when one scribe miscopies a single letter and fifty later copies are made from his, that is not fifty errors. It is one error, repeated. The mountain shrinks to a molehill the moment you count honestly. There is no document in all of ancient history that can stand next to the Bible for accuracy of transmission. The very abundance that lets a skeptic tally “differences” is what makes the original reading recoverable in the first place. You cannot triangulate a text you have one copy of. You can triangulate one you have thousands of.
• Whosoever WillDoes the information in DNA point to an intelligent designer?Whosoever Will, The Scientist Who Had to Believe: Wilder-Smith's question was simple: where does the information come from? The materialist answer, that random chemical interactions over sufficient time can generate biological information, is not a scientific answer. It is a philosophical commitment dressed in scientific language. No experiment has demonstrated the spontaneous generation of specified biological information from non-living chemistry. The second law of thermodynamics (entropy) describes the universal tendency of closed systems toward disorder, not toward increasing specified complexity. Wilder-Smith spent his career making this argument with the precision of a chemist who had actually done the math. The evolutionary response, that living systems are open systems receiving energy from the sun, does not resolve the problem. Sunlight falling on a pile of bricks does not produce a house. Energy without information produces chaos, not organization. You need not only energy but a blueprint, a code, a plan: to direct energy toward specified complexity. The blueprint for every living thing is DNA. And Wilder-Smith's point, made two decades before the intelligent design movement formalized it, is that the existence of a biological code requires a coder.
• Whosoever WillHow many manuscripts of the New Testament exist compared to other ancient books?Whosoever Will, A Mile of Witnesses: For Homer's Iliad (the most copied work of classical antiquity) scholars count under two thousand manuscripts. For the historians we trust without a second thought, the numbers are humiliating: Caesar, Tacitus, Herodotus reach us through a few dozen copies at best, the earliest a thousand years or more downstream from the men who wrote them. No one stands at a lectern and asks whether Tacitus wrote Tacitus. Then there is the New Testament. More than five thousand eight hundred Greek manuscripts catalogued and counting. Add the early translations: around ten thousand in Latin, thousands more in Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, and the figure climbs past twenty thousand. One survey measured the New Testament evidence at over two and a half million pages: a mile of witnesses, against the four feet a typical classical author can muster. If we threw out the New Testament for lack of evidence, we would have to burn every history book in the building first.
• Whosoever WillHow old is the earth according to the Bible?By the Bible's genealogies and a literal Genesis, the earth is thousands of years old, roughly six thousand by the traditional count, not billions.
• Whosoever WillHow was the King James Version translated?Whosoever Will, A Mile of Witnesses: The King James was not handed down from heaven in English. It was the work of forty-seven scholars who knew the original tongues, working in companies, each section checked by the others, the final editing carried by men like John Bois, who read Hebrew at five and studied Greek from four in the morning, and Lancelot Andrewes, a master of fifteen languages who gave hours a day to prayer. They built on the Byzantine Greek and on the blood-bought English of William Tyndale, strangled and burned for putting Scripture into the plowboy's tongue, whose last prayer was, Lord, open the King of England's eyes. Their own preface said the aim was not to make a new translation, but to make a good one better. So the King James is the best English fruit of the best Greek text.
• Whosoever WillIs answering from single verses isolating them?The whole counsel of God is the verses, all of them, and a doctrine that is in the whole counsel is in a sentence somewhere. John 6 was brought as the proof text for regeneration before faith and the word is not in the chapter. Reading a man's own citation is not isolating it.
• Whosoever WillIs the Bible the Word of God? Is the Bible reliable?Yes. "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Tim 3:16), "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" (2 Pet 1:21). Confirmed by fulfilled prophecy, manuscripts, and external witnesses like Josephus.
• With Chuck SmithWhat are the rules for interpreting the Bible?Chuck Smith, Sermon on the Mount Study Guide, Matthew 5: In interpreting Scripture certain guidelines need to be followed: (1) The understandable and natural meaning is usually the correct interpretation. (2) If the interpretation of Scripture makes the meaning seem absurd, then the interpretation is wrong. (3) If the interpretation contradicts the general body of scriptural truth, then it is wrong. (4) If the Bible is approached with pre–conceived thoughts or ideas, the interpretation will suffer. Study notes condensed from his teaching by The Word For Today. From Chuck Smith's books, used by permission of The Word For Today.
• Whosoever WillWhat do "elect" and "election" (eklektos, ekloge) mean?Eklektos (ἐκλεκτός) means chosen; eklogē (ἐκλογή), a choosing. Scripture’s election is corporate and in Christ: God "hath chosen us in him" (Eph 1:4). The elect are those in the Chosen One, entered by faith.
• Whosoever WillWhat does "draw" (helkuo) mean in John 6:44?Helkuō (ἑλκύω) means to draw or drag. "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him" (John 6:44). Jesus defines the drawing three verses later as teaching: "every man... that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh" (6:45).
• Whosoever WillWhat does "earnest" (arrabon) of the Spirit mean?Arrabōn (ἀῥραβών) is a down payment, a deposit that guarantees the full sum will come. "The earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession" (Eph 1:14). The Spirit is God’s guarantee of the believer’s future.
• Whosoever WillWhat does "freely" (dorean) mean in Revelation 22:17?Dōrean (δωρεάν) means freely, as a gift, without cost or cause. "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely [dōrean]" (Rev 22:17). It is the same word Paul uses: "justified freely by his grace" (Rom 3:24).
• Whosoever WillWhat does "It is finished" (tetelestai) mean?Tetelestai (τετέλεσται) is Jesus’ cry from the cross, "It is finished" (John 19:30). It is a perfect-tense verb meaning "it has been completed and stands completed". It does not mean "paid in full", and the truth is better than the myth.
• Whosoever WillWhat does "the Word... dwelt among us" mean (eskenosen)?Eskēnōsen (ἐσκήνωσεν), in John 1:14, means "pitched his tent" or "tabernacled." "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." John chose the tabernacle word: God moved into a tent of human flesh.
• Whosoever WillWhat does agapao (agape love) mean? Is it different from phileo?Agapao (ἀγαπάω) is to love with the will, a chosen, self-giving love, distinct in emphasis from phileo (affection, fondness). "God so loved [ēgapēsen] the world" (John 3:16) is agapao: a deliberate love for the world, not a feeling about the likeable.