Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas
Jeremy approaches Bible teaching with a passion for getting the basic doctrines explained so that the individual can understand them and then apply them to circumstances in their life. These basic and important lessons are nestled in a framework of history and progression of revelation from the Bible so the whole of Scripture can be applied to your physical and spiritual life.
Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas
NT Framework - Preserved Just for Us
Preserved, for us in our language. But is the Bible you hold, whether in English, French, Russian, or Mandorin, really the Word of God? Is the only true version of God's Word the ones in their original language?
More information about Beyond the Walls, including additional resources can be found at www.beyondthewalls-ministry.com
This series included graphics to illustrate what is being taught, if you would like to watch the teachings you can do so on Rumble (https://rumble.com/user/SpokaneBibleChurch) or on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtV_KhFVZ_waBcnuywiRKIyEcDkiujRqP).
Jeremy Thomas is the pastor at Spokane Bible Church in Spokane, Washington and a professor at Chafer Theological Seminary. He has been teaching the Bible for over 20 years, always seeking to present its truths in a clear and understandable manner.
Welcome to Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas and our series on the New Testament Framework. Today a smaller, bite-sized piece from the larger lesson. We hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2:It's the doctrine of preservation and this is coming out of the fact that, again, malachi, the Italian prophet, is the seal of the prophets and you therefore have a period of God being silent for 400 years. During that time they're meticulously, scrupulously copying texts over in Babylon, jerusalem, qumran, probably other places. These become families of manuscripts. You also have a translation in Greek right about 250 or so years before Christ, called the Septuagint. By the time you get Jesus and the apostles, obviously they're quoting the Old Testament a lot. I always say how could you possibly understand the New Testament if you don't already understand the Old Testament? Because they keep appealing to the Old Testament, the Old Testament, the Old Testament. They just keep going back to it, but they quote from various manuscripts, different manuscripts that sometimes differ in small ways with one another, and yet they refer to them all as the Word of God. Which shows you the doctrine of preservation that while there are these minor differences, they're so minor that there's nothing of substance there in the differences. It's just close enough. So two points that we can derive about the doctrine of preservation. Well, it's several, but first of all, one thing I would say about it is that in the doctrine of preservation. God did not intend to keep it exact like perfectly exact. Let me explain this just from a very easy to see idea. If God wanted to keep it perfectly intact, it would have to be in the original language right of Hebrew or Aramaic in the Old Testament and it could not, for example, have vowel pointings which were added by Hebrew scribes for pronunciation purposes. Like those could not be there because that would not be a perfect, exact replica of the original right. So just from that vantage point, in the doctrine of preservation God was not trying to keep it exactly, you know, letter for letter, without anything at all added even to help pronounce it. Okay, that was not God's point in preservation. If there's not a doctrine of preservation that is set up the way it is, the Word of God could never be taken into another language and still be called the Word of God. This would not be the Word of God. It would emphatically not be, because it's in English. But the doctrine of preservation, as it's presented in Scripture, set it up in a way where you can have His Word in any language. Now how can that be? I mean, if it originally came in Hebrew, aramaic and Greek, how can the word of God be in English, russian, moldovian, chinese dialects. How Well.
Speaker 2:First of all, the presupposition behind it all is that God is the author of human language. There was this article I read years ago by Dr Arthur Cussons, called who Taught Adam to Speak, and it works off the premise of if you have a baby, the baby is born, the baby doesn't know how to speak. The baby knows how to cry, go to the bathroom, okay, and drink milk. That's basically all the baby knows how to do. But in the first two to three years of life, the baby learns to speak and everybody goes, wow, this is, this, is, this is actually. They don't go wow, they go yeah, yeah, he knows how to say no. Now he knows how to say mommy, daddy, da, da, da, da, and it's almost viewed as something like eh, who cares?
Speaker 2:But as one expert in the English language said, by the time a child is three years old, they've already accomplished the greatest intellectual feat they will ever accomplish in their life, and that's learning a language without having known one previously. That is your greatest intellectual achievement. You'll never go beyond that. I won't either. You can't, because every other language we learn after that we learn having already known a previous language. But here you're going from no language to language. How does that happen? By listening right. Take a baby, set it in any culture. You can be born in America and sent to China, and if you're sat down in a Chinese family, you will learn to speak Chinese. So it's an imprinting process.
Speaker 2:The question then becomes how did the first human speak? How did they learn to speak if there's no previous speaker? Well, the answer to who then taught Adam to speak? Was God. God taught Adam to speak, was God. God taught Adam to speak. And from there, you know, the peoples that came from them learned to speak the same language until the Tower of Babel.
Speaker 2:So the first presupposition of how the Bible can come in any language is that God is the author of human language. He started the naming process in Genesis. He named the sky, he named the earth, he names these things, and then he says okay, adam, what would you like to call this animal? And he gets to give it a name. But God started the naming game. The second presupposition for how the Bible can be God's word in any language in the world is the Tower of Babel, because that chapter begins by saying at that time, everyone in the earth spoke the same language. There was one language, but then by the end of that, about nine verses later, you have 70 different languages and the people couldn't communicate with one another, so they had to stop building this monstrosity of a tower right. Who was the author of those 70 languages? God. And these become the two language presuppositions for understanding that the Bible, ultimately, would be translated into other languages and it would be still the Word of God.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us on Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas. If you would like to see the visuals that went along with today's sermon, you can find those on Rumble and on YouTube under Spokane Bible Church. That is where Jeremy is the pastor and teacher. We hope you found today's lesson productive and useful in growing closer to God and walking more obediently with Him. If you found this podcast to be useful and helpful, then please consider rating us in your favorite podcast app, and until next time, we hope you have a blessed and wonderful day.