The English Bible

6/4/25

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Bible Class Transcript

The Price of English Scripture

The year is 1519 and the place is Coventry, England. Seven people have been sentenced to be purified by the Catholic Church. And by purified, they mean burned at the stake. Their crime? They were found guilty of reading the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments to their children in English. And they were burned alive for that crime.

And what happened to their children? Well, they were all taken to the monks of the Gray Friars, where they were examined by one Friar Stafford. And he warned them, "Upon pain of suffering such death as their parents, They should in no wise to meddle any more with the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Commandments in English.

Tyndale’s Revolution

Now let’s move ahead a few years to 1526. In that year William Tyndale translated and published the first ever mechanically printed New Testament in the English language. 1526. Gutenberg’s Bible, if you’re all familiar with, you can see a page of that on the handout. That was 70 years earlier, but it was in Latin. It was not in English. Tyndale’s was in English. You can also see a page from Tyndale’s translation there on the front page of the handout and that was in 1526.

Now again I said it’s show and tell. One of the things I wanted to show was this little page which is an actual handwritten Latin page from a Bible, a Latin Bible written in 1240. It’s about 800 years ago and again you can see it it’s on the back of the handout. I took a picture of it on the back of the handout. And it looks like it’s been typewritten. It’s so carefully, can you imagine writing the entire Bible? And then when you finish, you start another one. And if you think that’s bad, think about how many sheep it took to make all this vellum.

The Tyndale Bible was not in Latin. Tyndale was in English. Why did Tyndale do that? Well, he answered that question was asked that by a priest. And Tyndale famously responded, “If God spare my life, ere many years pass, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more Scripture than you do,” he said to that priest.

Now, ten years later, in 1536, at the age of 42, William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake. You can also see a depiction of that in the wood carving there on the handout. And Tyndale’s final words, spoken, quote, “at the stake with a fervent zeal and a loud voice,” were reported to be this, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

The Opening of Eyes

Well, the king of England’s eyes were opened. It was Henry VIII, so we can wonder what opened them but they were opened and he authorized the great bible three years later which was the first authorized printed english translation of the scriptures the great bible and you know what it was almost entirely based on tyndale’s translation now tyndale’s translation was incomplete at his death so they had to do some more translating but But where Tyndale had translated the great Bible, it was called, was largely based on what Tyndale had done.

Now the Geneva Bible followed in 1557 and it was not being printed in England, it was being printed in Geneva, hence the name Geneva Bible. Why not in England? Because of the reign of Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary who was persecuting all who were not Catholic. Now you can, if you look on the back of the handout, next to the the one on vellum, you’ll see a page from the Geneva Bible, which is printed, it’s not handwritten, it’s printed. And if you want to see one in person, again, show and tell, right down there, that’s an actual page from a Geneva Bible.

The King James Version was published 50 years later, in 1611. 50 years later.

Tyndale’s Genius

What had William Tyndale accomplished in his 42 short years? Well, he had single-handedly translated much of the Bible into English. And his translation was so accurate and so beautiful that when the King James English Bible appeared about a hundred years later, the New Testament was 83% the same as Tyndale’s translation in the Old Testament was 76% the same for those books that Tyndale had translated before he died.

Tyndale was a master translator. Finding the perfect word in English, arranging them in the perfect order, crafting phrases that are memorable and beautiful and that accurately convey the underlying language, those are all the works of a translator and William Tyndale was a genius, a genius at doing that.

You know, two translations can both be very accurate, but one can be a joy to read and the other less so. And I’ll give as an example, the King James Version and the American Standard Version of 1901. King James Version, ah, I mean, to read the King James Version, beautiful, beautiful, beyond description. American Standard, accurate, probably more accurate than the King James Version. But most of the beauty and the majesty, it’s rightly been called strong in Greek, but weak in English.

The Power of Translation

You know, if you wonder whether it really matters, there is a subjective component to it, certainly. But let’s look at two translations of 2 Samuel 18:33. And let’s think about the word choice and the cadence the sentence structure, the word arrangement, and the sound.

Here’s the first one. King was overcome with emotion. He went up to the room over the gateway, and he burst into tears. And as he went, he cried, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, if only I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son.” That’s one translation.

Here’s another one. And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept. And as he went, thus he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee! O Absalom, my son, my son.” That’s the King James Version. It’s almost verbatim Tyndale’s translation.

They each get the point across, but I think one of them, I think we would agree, towers over the other one. And getting across the beauty and the tragedy and the majesty of what’s going on. You know, but we often hear, oh, the King James Version is so complicated. We can’t read the King James Version. Who’s gonna understand it? It’s so, that verse I just read, there are two, only two non-monosyllabic words in what I just read, only two. chamber and Absalom. The rest are single syllable words. Keep in mind that Tyndale was translating for the plow boy.

Tyndale’s Lasting Impact

Tyndale was a genius in coming up with the perfect way to express the underlying language in English, whether it was Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic. You know, if anyone ever asked you, let’s say you get on Jeopardy. And the answer is, the answer is, the Englishman from the 1500s who inserted more phrases into common usage than anyone else. If you say, who is William Shakespeare? No, the answer is, who is William Tyndale?

One author writes, more of our English is ultimately learned from Tyndale than from any other writer. Here are some of the translated English phrases be traced back to Tyndale’s translation of the Bible. “In my Father’s house are many mansions, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory. In Him we live, move, and have our being. Be not weary in well-doing, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faiths. let not your hearts be troubled. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light.”

And yes, those are translations of the underlying Greek or Hebrew, but the word choice, cadence, translation, that’s Tyndale. Each of those came from the English version of the Bible that Tyndale translated and printed, and for which he was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church.

Imagine the Blessing

Now take yourself back to England in the 1500s. You’re living there, you’re in the 1500s, and let’s imagine that you are that plow boy that Tyndale was speaking about. That’s you. That’s me. You’ve never heard the Word of God read in your own language. You’ve never heard it. You’ve never heard it in a language you can understand. But suddenly you do. Suddenly you hear it in your own language. The Word of God. God is no longer being hoarded. God is no longer being kept at a distance. The You are no longer living in a time when there’s a famine for the Word of God in the land. You can hear it. You can read it for the first time in your life.

What’s my point in recounting all that history? It’s interesting, but I do have a point. And my point is, I fear that sometimes we are guilty for taking one of our greatest blessings for granted. A blessing that people gave their life for. And that is free access to the Word of God in our own language. Many many people have lived and died throughout history without enjoying that blessing.

You know, if you could go back in time and hand your English Bible to someone living in 1500 England at that time, do you think that Bible would sit on the shelf collecting dust? Do you think that person would find some other interesting things to do rather than open that Bible? I think they would devour the Word of God. Don’t you think?

The next time you open your Bible and start to read, pretend you’re reading that for the very first time. Read it through the eyes of someone who had been denied that privilege up until that very moment. Read it through the eyes of someone who had never heard or read the Word of God in their own language in their entire lifetime. In the 1500s that was true of almost everyone.

On Reading Physical Bibles

And while we’re on the subject, let me make a plug for reading a paper copy of the Bible with a pencil in your hand. Now as my dad used to say, that may have been where I quit preaching and went to meddling. That’s how you learn something. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that reading comprehension in our schools went through the floor at the same time they started passing out iPads.

Yeah, we can benefit a lot from electronic versions of Bible. Believe me, I’ve got my share of them and I use them. You’ll often see me over there pecking away. You can search easily, you can take notes easily, you can carry around a bunch of books easily, but there are two problems with using only an electronic copy of the Bible.

Problem number one, we have been hardwired now to skim anything we see on a screen. Why? Because it might not be there very long. So we start at the top and we loop down to the bottom. I don’t think that’s something we can turn off anymore. And that’s not how we need to be studying the Bible.

But second let me ask you this question. Your house is on fire what are you gonna grab? You know in my case I think I’d start grabbing some Bibles. Maybe my granddad’s Bible he carried around in his shirt pocket for 40 years when he was preaching, had all his notes on it. I’d grab that one, my dad’s Bible, grandmother’s Bible. I’d start grabbing Bibles. They left me a great legacy with those Bibles and I still open them and read them and look at them and see what they wrote. What legacy are we leaving behind with our iPhones?

The Catholic Church’s Opposition

Now before we leave this subject let me ask another question. Why? Why didn’t the Catholics want the Bible translated into English? What was their problem? Why did they care? Why did they kill people who did that? There can be only one answer. We all know what it is. An understandable Bible was a threat to their authority. They did not want the people to be using the Bible against them as any sort of authority because they knew they had departed from the Bible. That departure continues to this current day. I mean, they’ve made the news a lot lately. But the Catholic Church was an enemy of the cross of Christ in the 1500s, and the Catholic Church is an enemy of the cross of Christ today. There be no doubt about that.

Reformation and Restoration

Now once the Bible was in the language of the people, what happened? The Reformation followed almost immediately, and then the Restoration. You know, the Reformation was a good step in the right direction, but it was badly flawed because they were trying to reform something that needed to be cast aside. Instead, what was needed was restoration.

And how did restoration work? People opened the Word of God, they saw what God wanted, they saw how God wanted to be worshipped, they saw what was pleasing to God, and they did that through everything else aside. That’s restoration. Absent the Bible and English, that restoration might never have occurred because we would have had no pattern to follow. wouldn’t have been able to understand it.

On Inspiration and Translation

Now let’s talk a little bit about inspiration. Our Bibles of course are in English, but the Bible as I mentioned was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. Can the inspiration of the original languages survive the translation process? The answer is yes. How do we know that though? How do we know that with certainty? And the reason we can know that with certainty is because of the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And when the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament, most often what’s being quoted is the Septuagint, a translation. So that shows us it’s possible.

Now, we have to look at that translation and make sure it’s being as transparent as possible. A good translation is like a sheet of glass through which you’re seeing the underlying language, but you’re seeing it in your own language, but it’s not distorting it, it’s not blocking part of it out, it’s not magnifying it, it’s not shrinking it, it’s letting you see it in your own language. That’s the mark of a good translation. And if we have a translation like that, then we know that inspiration can survive the translation process 'cause we have an example of it in the New Testament.

What Inspiration Is Not

What is inspiration? That word inspired, God breathed, it’s used only once in the New Testament, 2 Timothy 3:16, we’re all familiar with the verse. It literally means God breathed. What does it mean when we say that scriptures are God breathed? Well, let’s start with what it does not mean.

Inspiration is not just some high level of human achievement. “Oh, that artist, they must have just been inspired when they painted that. That’s an inspired work. Imagine how creative they are.” No, that’s not what we mean. Not at all. Bible is not a work of man.

Inspiration is not just the thoughts either. We sometimes hear that. You’ll sometimes hear someone say, “Well, you know, God kind of conveyed to Paul some thoughts about love and then Paul kind of filled in the details and wrote 1 Corinthians 13.” No, no, that’s not inspiration. That’s not how the Bible was inspired. That’s not how it happened. like “Thus saith the Lord” and “The Word of God” those phrases appear over 3,800 times just in the Old Testament. This is God speaking.

And if men took the thoughts of God and came up with the words themselves, then why the warning in Deuteronomy 4 too? "You shall not add to the Word. You should not diminish from the Word. And if men took the thoughts of God and came up with the words themselves, then how do we explain 1 Peter 1 10-11 that says sometimes those authors didn’t even know what they were writing about. They didn’t understand it themselves. And if God supplied the thoughts but men came up with the words, And how do we explain things like Matthew 22, 23-33 that depends upon the tense of a verb or Galatians 3, 16 that depends upon a word being singular instead of plural? It’s not just thoughts, it’s words, the words of God. God revealed His thoughts in words and that’s why it’s verbal inspiration. means in words.

Inspiration is not the act of God upon the reader. We hear that sometimes too. Some, particularly today, it seems, say, "Well, you know, men are free to determine the meaning of Scripture for themselves, and if I determine something for me, then that’s my truth, and then you may read it and you may have a different understanding, and then that’s your truth and God has inspired me to have my truth and God has inspired you to have your truth. No, it is not the act of God upon the reader. Two verses are enough to bring that argument crashing to the ground. Romans 3 verse 4, “Let God be true, though every man a liar.” And 2 Peter 1 verse 20, "Knowing this first, no prophecy of scriptures of any private interpretation.

Something else inspiration is not. Inspiration is not just something that applies to some topics in the Bible, but not to everything in the Bible. I mean, let’s don’t get carried away, right? Hear that sometimes today too. That viewpoint might be called partial inerrancy. Yeah, the Bible is the inerrant word of God when it comes to deep theological matters, but it’s not the inerrant word of God when it comes to science and history and stuff like that. Then it’s the errant word of God. It’s the mistake filled word of God.

You know, it’s interesting to me that no one, as far as I’ve ever been able to find, has ever made that argument in the opposite direction. Oh yeah, the Bible is certainly true when it comes to science and technology and history, but how can we trust it on theological matters? No one’s ever made that argument. But they go the opposite way all the time. Why is it that the partial inerrancy crowd seems so certain the Bible remains inerrant on theological matters when they believe it’s error filled on history and science and things like that?

You know, if the Bible can’t be trusted to tell me the truth on things I can test, then why would I ever trust it on things I can’t test? I mean, who would believe a prophet that came along and told you something that’s going to happen a thousand years from now, when that prophet couldn’t even tell you the name of the king ruling in the country next door, as they argue about Daniel. John 3, verse 12, “If I have told you earthly things and you believe them not, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” Jesus’ question. And the answer is that, well, if what he told us about those earthly things isn’t true, then why would we believe anything he has to tell us about heavenly things?

If the Bible contains errors, any errors, then it’s not something we should pattern our lives around. It’s not something we should stake our eternal destiny on. And the Bible does not just contain the Word of God. The Bible is the Word of God. If it just contains the Word of God, then how do I know where it is? Which verse qualifies? Thy Word is truth, John 17, 17.

Another thing inspiration is not, it is not mechanical dictation. The books of the Bible, they had unique styles, they had unique vocabularies. peculiar to the backgrounds of the authors, the human authors. Mark, for example, is written in very simple Greek. Luke, Acts, very scholarly Greek. Barclay, for example, says that the first four verses of Luke are the best bit of Greek in the New Testament. And in fact, if we look at those first four verses of Luke, we have to ask this question, if Luke’s just taking dictation, Why does he bother to tell us that he has closely followed everything so he can give us an orderly account? Which is what he says in Luke 1, 1-4.

How Inspiration Works

But how do we explain that? How does inspiration work if it’s not mechanical dictation? Well the first thing we should note of course is that inspiration was a miracle. And so as with all miracles we can’t say a whole lot about how it worked. work because of the power of God and that it’s outside the natural world which means you know we can’t fully understand it but I do have an analogy that might be helpful is it a perfect analogy no we know it’s not a perfect analogy because no analogy is perfect because when an analogy becomes perfect it ceases to be an analogy but here it is

And the show and tell continues. How many of you remember a marks a lot? That’s the biggest marks a lot they sell. Got a half inch tip. (laughs) Alright. I know you can’t see this. This is the thinnest mechanical pencil on planet Earth. You have to go to Tokyo to get them, I think. It’s a.2 millimeter. If you breathe on the lead, it will break.

Now let’s assume I’m going to write something down for you. I’m going to write you a note. I’ve got just kind of a regular sheet of paper, and I’m going to write you a note. Do you think my note and my word choice and the lengths of the note and the way I write the note. Do you think it will differ based on whether I choose this or this? And the answer is yeah. Or what if I choose a beautiful fountain pen or I choose something else? And the answer is yeah, it’s gonna differ quite a bit based upon the writing instrument I choose.

I think it’s similar with God. You know, maybe Mark is the marks a lot. You know, maybe Luke is the fountain pen. Maybe Paul is the technical pencil. Maybe John is the paintbrush. They are each an instrument in God’s hand, but he uses that instrument in a different way to give us his words, just like I would do if I’m using different writing instruments. It’s the best analogy I could come up with.

What Inspiration Is

So we’ve looked at what inspiration is not. Let me ask this question. What is it? Well, the Bible is inspired, God breathed in the sense that each word, each letter of each word, each word in the original autograph copies of the scriptures is a word that God provided, that God breathed out. And that was then recorded through the use of a human instrument. That’s inspiration. That’s what it means for it to be the Word of God written down by human authors, human instruments. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. All Scripture is breathed out by God. 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17. Those words do not originate from man. They originate from God. It’s what it tells us right there. 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17.

And note that it’s the words that are inspired, not the author. You know, sometimes we talk about the inspired authors of scripture. I suppose there’s some way in which that’s correct, but technically it’s not correct. The words are what are breathed out. The words, they are what is inspired.

Original Autographs and Copies

And I just mentioned the original autograph copies of the Bible. What do I mean by that? Well, what I mean by that are the actual physical copies that the original author held in his hand and wrote on. The first copy, the original autographed, handwritten copy of the book. That is where the inspiration came. Let me make three quick points about that. Each of these three quick points could be an entire class, but we’re not gonna do that. Three quick points.

First, we no longer have those original autograph copies. We don’t have a single one. All we have now are copies. That’s point number one.

Point number two, we know that on occasion, and despite the great care that the scribes undertook in copying the scripture, errors were sometimes introduced in the copying process. Sometimes a word was left out. Sometimes numbers were transposed. Sometimes one word was written down and in place of another word. You can kind of picture the scribe looking over here and writing over here, looking over here and writing over here. And sometimes a mistake was introduced in the copying of a book of the Bible. I think they’re minor, but they’re there. How do we know for certain they’re there? We know for certain they’re there because we have the manuscripts and we can hold them up and say, well, this word says here and that word’s a little different. So we know there are some minor errors in the copying process. Usually we can figure out exactly what the original was. There’s a whole science in doing that. That’s what would take a whole other class, which is interesting.

But let me move to my third point. Third point, despite those few rare errors that get introduced in the copying process, the great care in which those books were copied. Despite that, we can have faith in the accuracy of the copies that we have. Why do I say that? Two reasons. One, we can have faith in the providence of God in accurately relaying His word to future generations. But second, we have physical evidence of that. The greatest archaeological discovery in history was the of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And those Dead Sea Scrolls took what was our earliest manuscript of the Bible back a thousand years and we could then compare the two. What do you think they found? Minor, trivial differences.

Inspiration Requires Inerrancy

What can we say about the fact that the words in the Bible are breathed out by God? One thing we can say is that inspiration requires inerrancy. Absent inerrancy there can be no inspiration. It is impossible for God to lie, Hebrews 6:18. God cannot lie, Titus 1 verse 2. “Thy word is true,” John 17:17. “Thy word is true from the beginning,” Psalm 119:160. God cannot lie. God cannot breathe error. But that’s exactly what we’re saying if we say, “Well, the Bible is kind of inerrant on a few things, but over here it’s made all sorts of mistakes.” No, God does not breathe error.

God’s Word is unchanging. God’s Word is eternal. Psalm 119:89, 1 Peter 1:24 and 25. Endures forever. And when the Bible talks about Scripture, it’s plain, the New Testament is also Scripture. That’s not just the Old Testament. In 1 Timothy 5:18, Paul quotes two sources, Deuteronomy 25, verse 4, and Luke 10, verse 7, and he calls them both Scripture. And in 2 Peter 3:15 and 16, Peter refers to Paul’s letters as Scripture.

You know, sometimes we hear this argument, "Well, those New Testament writers, you know, well, maybe it’s the Word of God, but they didn’t really know that’s They’re just writing a letter. You know, they’re just writing a letter. We hear that sometimes. Absolutely false. They knew what they were writing was the Word of God. 1 Thessalonians 2:13, “Which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God.” 1 Thessalonians 2:13. Paul knew.

You know, sometimes we hear this too. People say, “Well, Jesus is the Word made flesh.” John 1, 14, and you know, I think what that means is we just all need to kind of focus on Jesus and let’s not get all worked up over the words. Anyone who thinks that just needs to keep reading in the Gospel of John until they get to John 12, verse 48. “He that rejects me and receives not my words hath one that judgeth him. The word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.” We ignore the words of Almighty God at our peril, at our extreme peril.

Jesus and Scripture

What did Jesus say about the Bible? Well Jesus says many of those, Jesus refers to many of the historical events in the Old Testament. He lets us know they were just that, historical events. Adam and Eve, Matthew 19 verse 5. Abel, Luke 11 verse 51. Noah and the flood, Matthew 24. Jonah and the fish, Matthew 12. Hmm, you know, if we were to list the things in the Old Testament that are most often attacked by modern man, what would we come up with? The same list. Creation, Noah, Jonah. Jesus referred to all of them. Jesus confirms what we know about the Bible. It is the word of God. It’s true, cannot be broken, John 10:35. It will never pass away, Matthew 24:35.

Why We Can Trust the Bible

Why can we trust the Bible? Well we can trust it because it’s historically accurate. You know we just finished looking at Hosea and Joel in great detail, great detail, and I think we saw it’s historically accurate. We’ve looked at many others. We’ve looked at Daniel in great detail, Zechariah, Ezra, Esther. There are 29 ancient kings mentioned by name in the Bible that also appear on ancient monuments. 29. From Egypt, Israel, Moab, Damascus, Tyre, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia. And when you look at those 29 names, what you find is that the Bible agrees with those monuments to the name, to the country, and to the chronology. You know, a lot of people are so quick to throw the Bible out the window when it comes historical evidence the Bible is our greatest historical evidence.

We can trust the Bible because it is scientifically accurate. You know for years and years now we’ve been hearing about the Big Bang, right? At some point, like 15 billion years back, we’re told that the Big Bang happened, and along all the material out in the space, all the galaxies, and you know, fast forward 15 billion years, and you know, suddenly we have us. So you know, something happened in between, but that’s what’s goes. Giant explosion, and now here we are. The Big Bang. It’s called the Standard Cosmological Model by astronomers. The Big Bang.

And you know they just seem so certain about that don’t they? They just all seemed, I’m using past tense there, seemed so certain about that. They’re not so certain anymore. I don’t know if y’all been following it or not, but if you’ve been watching the astronomy videos and I hope you have. You’re going to see a lot of doubt among people that seemed oh so certain not that long ago. And why are they seeing so much doubt? Because they got a new telescope, the Webb telescope, James Webb Space Telescope.

And they are looking at things that are just about as far away as we’ll ever see. And there is a limit to how far we can see. Because apparently, what we’re told is that the universe is expanding at a speed that is greater than the speed of light. So eventually you get to the point where the light coming toward us is actually moving away from us, because it’s moving away faster than it’s heading this way. So there’s actually a limit. And they’re getting awfully close to that limit.

And what they think they’re seeing is the early stage of the universe. In other words, this is right after the big bang. So what did they think they were going to see? They thought they were going to see baby galaxies. Just tiny little galaxies, just starting off in life. Nothing like the Milky Way. Nothing big and complicated and old looking. It’s not at all what they’re seeing. It’s not at all what they’re seeing. And to say it in a colloquial way, they’re freaking out. I mean, they don’t know. You just watch the videos. That’s not what they’re seeing.

Here’s what they, I got this right off one of their videos. "Galaxies should be rare, slow-growing, and simple, "but the galaxies we are finding are fast, bright, “and chemically complex, which,” they say, quote, "means the early universe might have been far more active “than we imagined, and our current models are incomplete.” Incomplete is a code word for dead wrong.

And what about that big bang? Well now they’re saying, well you know, if you have an explosion over there and it’s throwing stuff out over here, then you kind of expect the stuff over here to be a little different than the stuff over there. They’re saying that and that’s not what they’re finding. So now they’re saying, I guess the big bang, let me read it the way they say it, happened literally everywhere at once. They say that matter came into existence everywhere in the universe at a particular time. That’s why it’s all so complicated at the furthest reach of our telescope because it just all happened at once. At the same time, everywhere is what they’re saying.

So science has left the Big Bang and now it’s saying this. The early universe was very active and came into existence everywhere at a single instance of time. They could have saved some money on the James Webb telescope and just read the first verse of the Bible. In the beginning God created heavens and the earth. That’s what they’re seeing through their telescope. That sermon was free of charge. Never bet against the Bible, you’ll lose every single time.

We can trust the Bible because it’s prophecies have never failed. You know, when we studied the book of Daniel, we looked at Daniel chapter 11, which is the most intricate prophecy in the Bible. It goes in the greatest detail from the days of Daniel to the days of Christ. Through king after king after king, through war after war after war, through battle after battle after battle. And if you’d like to read all about that or listen to it or watch the video or see my great handout on the subject, ThyWordIsTruth.com. But that prophecy is so incredible that that’s why Daniel, the book of Daniel, has become a battleground. They try to move it as far in the future as they possibly can to get it past that wonderful prophecy. But there’s a problem with that. Those Dead Sea Scrolls, they found copies of Daniel in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Dead Sea Scrolls predate the Roman Empire, which is mentioned in the prophecies. They can only push it so far.

We could give many, many other examples. We could give examples where God gave us the names of people before they were even born. Cyrus, Josiah. We can trust the Bible because we can trust God. And if we don’t trust the Bible, that means we’re not trusting God.

Conclusion

You know, maybe the best way to end a class on the English Bible, and the Bible, and inspiration, why we can trust the Scripture, is to end where the psalmist began. “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night.”

We have that choice here today. We have that choice every day. Are we going to sit in the seat of the scornful or are we going to take delight in the Word of God? And believe me, we are surrounded by the scornful, aren’t we? And oh, they’re so certain they’re right, just like they were so certain about that big bang that has now been disproven.

The Bible is the Word of Almighty God and we can hold it in our hand in our own language to read it, understand it, and be set free by it. You should thank God every day for that blessing. Thank you very much for your attention.