The words of the LORD are pure words:
as silver tried in a furnace of earth,
purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them, O LORD,
thou shalt preserve them
from this generation for ever.
Psalms 12:6-7
as silver tried in a furnace of earth,
purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them, O LORD,
thou shalt preserve them
from this generation for ever.
Psalms 12:6-7
| God promises to preserve His words. | The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever. (Psalms 12:6-7) |
| You shall not add or take away, says God. | Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the judgments, which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land which the LORD God of your fathers giveth you. Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you. (Deuteronomy 4:1-2) |
| God cares about every one of His words. | Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar. (Proverbs 30:5-6) |
| God's words will never pass away. | Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. (Jesus Christ, Son of God) (Mark 13:31) |
| God will curse those who change His Word. | For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. (Revelation 22:18-19) |
The Roman Catholic Church in its perpetual indoctrination of its very trusting following has them parrot what they are told: that we have the Bible today because of the Roman Catholic Church!
Praise God, this is not so! Nothing could be further from the truth. I have previously given many such expositions, this to add to the veritable claim that God's word was preserved by a holy people, who worshiped Him, and knew not to add nor delete a single iota of His word as given by Him!
"Josephus and Philo “assure us that they would have undergone all sorts of torments rather than have taken a letter from the Scripture, or altered a word of it” (John Kitto, Illustrated History of the Bible, edited by Alvan Bond, 1908, p. 39). Countless Jews have died in their zeal to protect and preserve the Old Testament Bible."
Again, praise God!
EVIDENCE AT THE SHRINE OF THE BOOK
The following is from the new illustrated book Israel: Past, Present, and Future, which will be available by the end of September.
It is fascinating that the two greatest historical witnesses to the authority of the Masoretic Hebrew Bible, which is the basis for the great Protestant Bibles such as the Luther German Luther, the Reina Valera Spanish, and the King James English, are located in one place: the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.
They are the keepers of both the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Aleppo Codex.
The Masoretic text was preserved by careful Hebrew scribes prior to the invention of printing by moveable type in the 15th century. (The first printed Hebrew Bible appeared in 1488.)
The Shrine of the Book was opened in 1965 by the Israel Museum, only 17 years after the War of Independence. Its national importance is evident by the fact that it is located near the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset).
The roof of the museum is in the shape of the lid of the clay jars that protected the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the corridor leading into the museum resembles a cave. The brilliant white of the museum’s roof contrasts sharply with the black wall nearby, signifying the warfare between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness described in writings of the Essenes community found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Essenes cult wrongly thought of itself as the true Sons of Light, and the modern state of Israel does not understand the real significance of such things. But the Bible held in the Shrine of the Book teaches that there is a war between truth and error, light and darkness, and that it will culminate at the return of Christ.
It is most amazing and wonderful that the two greatest witnesses to the authenticity of the Masoretic Bible are located in the Jewish Shrine of the Book in the modern state of Israel, because it was to the Jews that God assigned the task of preserving the Hebrew Bible. In Romans 3:1-2 Paul calls the Hebrew Old Testament the “oracles of God” (“oracles” means utterance), and tells us that these oracles were committed to the Jews. Though the Jews did not obey the Scripture, they revered it. Josephus and Philo “assure us that they would have undergone all sorts of torments rather than have taken a letter from the Scripture, or altered a word of it” (John Kitto, Illustrated History of the Bible, edited by Alvan Bond, 1908, p. 39). Countless Jews have died in their zeal to protect and preserve the Old Testament Bible.
This reverence was placed in their hearts by the God of the Bible for the purpose of its preservation.
In particular, it was the Jewish priests who were assigned as the keepers of the Scriptures (Deut. 31:24-26; 17:18).
After the Babylonian captivity there was a revival within the Jewish priesthood (Ezra 7:10) and the Old Testament Scriptures were preserved. “By Ezra and his successors, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, all the Old Testament books were gathered together into one Old Testament canon, and their texts were purged of errors and preserved until the days of our Lord’s earthly ministry. By that time the Old Testament text was so firmly established that even the Jews’ rejection of Christ could not disturb it” (Edward Hills, The King James Bible Defended, 4th edition, p. 93).
Following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., it was Jewish scribes called Tannaim (Teachers) who guarded the Old Testament Scriptures. These scribes “copied the text of the Old Testament with great accuracy” (Edward Hills, The King James Bible Defended, 4th edition, p. 93). The Tannaim were followed by the other scribes called Amoraim (Expositors). Though they exalted man-made tradition above the Scripture in daily practice, they highly revered the Scripture and preserved it from generation to generation. (It was during this time that the Talmud was produced, which canonized the rabbinical tradition.)
Beginning in the sixth century, it was THE MASORETES (Traditionalists) who jealously guarded the Hebrew text and passed it down from generation to generation from the 6th century A.D. It is the Masoretic Hebrew Bible that was adopted by Christians and used in the first printed Bibles.
The Masoretes were families of Hebrew scholars who had centers in Palestine, Tiberias, and Babylon. The traditional Hebrew Masoretic text gets its name from these scholars. One of the most famous was Ben Asher at Tiberias, who “labored to produce a correct copy of the Scriptures.” From the 12th century forward the Ben Asher text was the received Hebrew Bible.
The Masoretes exercised great care in transcribing the Old Testament. They developed stringent rules for copying in order to keep the text pure. The following rules are from General Biblical Introduction by Herbert Miller (1937), with information added from other sources.
The parchment must be made from the skin of clean animals; must be prepared by a Jew only, and the skins must be fastened together by strings taken from clean animals.
Each column must have no less than 48 nor more than 60 lines. The entire copy must be first lined.
The ink must be of no other color than black, and it must be prepared according to a special recipe.
No word or letter could be written from memory; the scribe must have an authentic copy before him, and he must read and pronounce aloud each word before writing it.
He must reverently wipe his pen each time before writing the word for “God” (Elohim) and he must wash his whole body before writing the name “Jehovah” lest the Holy Name be contaminated.
Every word and every letter was counted, and if a letter was omitted, an extra letter inserted, or if one letter touched another, that section of the manuscript was condemned and destroyed. A Masoretic Hebrew manuscript of Genesis contains 4,395 lines in 43 columns, with 27,713 words and 78,100 letters.
Miller concludes with this observation: “Some of these rules may appear extreme and absurd, yet they show how sacred the Holy Word of the Old Testament was to its custodians, the Jews (Rom. 3:2), and they give us strong encouragement to believe that WE HAVE THE REAL OLD TESTAMENT, THE SAME ONE WHICH OUR LORD HAD AND WHICH WAS ORIGINALLY GIVEN BY INSPIRATION OF GOD” (General Biblical Introduction, 1937, p. 185).
The Great Isaiah Scroll
The Great Isaiah Scroll was found in Cave 1 at Qumran near the Dead Sea in 1947. It contains the entire book of Isaiah. It was written on 17 pieces of sheepskin sewn together to form a scroll measuring about 24 feet in length. It resides at the Shrine of the Book, and a realistic facsimile is on display in the main room. It has been dated at least four times by the carbon-14 method and the results have ranged from 335 to 107 B.C. Other dating techniques (e.g., writing material and style, associated artifacts) have dated it to 150-100 B.C. Thus it was written at least a century before Christ, if not two or three centuries.
Every book of the Old Testament was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls except the book of Esther, and sixty to sixty-five percent of the scrolls represent the Masoretic text. This is amazing since the earliest Hebrew codexes of the Masoretic text used by scholars in the 16th and 17th centuries (such as the Aleppo) were written more than a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls. The differences between the conservative Dead Sea scrolls and the Masoretic text are extremely minor, largely pertaining to spelling or grammar, the omission or addition of a word, or the mixing of Hebrew letters. For example, one of the two Isaiah scrolls found in Cave 1 leaves out one “holy” from Isaiah 6:3, obviously a scribal oversight. Comparing Isaiah 53 in the Great Isaiah Scroll of 100 B.C. and the Apello Codex of 900 A.D., there are only three letters that differ. As for the Great Isaiah Scroll and its agreement with the Masoretic text, Dr. Ernst Wurthwein calls it “striking” and Adolfo Roitman calls it “extraordinarily close” (Wurthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, 1979, p. 144; Roitman, The Bible in the Shrine of the Book, 2006, p. 43).
The Aleppo Codex
The other great witness to the authority of the Masoretic Hebrew Bible at the Shrine of the Book is the Aleppo Codex (known in Hebrew as Ha-Keter, meaning the Crown). It was made in about 920 A.D. in Tiberias, which was a center of Jewish scholarship after the razing of Jerusalem. It was also a center for the creation of the Talmud, which is a collection of Jewish tradition that was raised (in practice) to an authority equal to that of the Scripture and which Jesus soundly condemned in Matthew 15 and 23.
The Aleppo manuscript was copied by Shlomo Ben Boya’a, and the vowel markings were added by renowned master scribe Aaron ben Asher. For nearly 1,000 years it “was used as the standard text in the correction of books” while “generations of scribes made pilgrimages to consult” it (Roitman, p. 62). It resided at a synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, from about 1099 to 1375, when it was moved to the synagogue in Aleppo, Syria. There it resided in a double-locked metal box in “the Cave of Elijah” (according to their tradition, Elijah was exiled there). The keys were held by two prominent men and the box could only be opened in the presence of both men on the authority of the synagogue’s leaders. On December 2, 1947, after the adoption of the UN resolution to establish a Jewish state, the Aleppo synagogue was destroyed by rampaging Muslims during the riots that broke out all over the Arab world. The rioters broke into the iron box and ripped pages from the Codex and threw it on the floor. Most of the Pentateuch was lost, as well as some other portions. Someone recovered the damaged Codex and it was hidden for the next several years. In 1958 it was smuggled to Turkey hidden in a washing machine, and from there brought to Jerusalem. It was laboriously restored over a six-year period by the Israel Museum and today is on display in the Shrine of the Book.
Scholars now admit that the Masoretic text was the standard Hebrew Bible at the end of the Second Temple period. This has been proven not only by the Dead Sea Scrolls but also by scrolls found at Masada, Wadi Murabba’at, Nahal Hever, and Nahal Tze’elim. Adolfo Roitman says the Masoretic “apparently became the authoritative text for mainstream Judaism toward the end of the Second Temple period” (The Bible and the Shrine of the Book, p. 56).
In light of Romans 3:1-2, that is a major admission! Liberal scholars see the Masoretic text and the competing Septuagint and Samaritan texts as representing equally legitimate texts. They believe it is only because the rabbis banned the former that the Masoretic text won out. They see it as an accident of history. For example, Geza Vermes says,
“[The existence of both Masoretic and Septuagint texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls] suggests that in the Qumran age Hebrew texts corresponding to the Samaritan and the ancient Greek versions jointly circulated, thus buttressing the theory that the proto-Masoretic, Samaritan and Septuagint-type of Hebrew text forms happily co-existed before rabbinic censorship eliminated the last two around 100 CE” (The Story of the Scrolls, p. 106).
This is almost exactly what liberal New Testament scholars believe about the Alexandrian Greek text. They think that the Traditional Greek Text underlying the Protestant Bibles won out only because it was proclaimed official by church councils and pushed by church authorities. They hold this view because they do not believe that the Old and New Testaments were given by divine inspiration and preserved by the same God who authored them. The Bible to them is a purely human product, and in studying it they only consider the human element.
But in light of Paul’s statement in Romans 3:1-2 and the many promises in Scripture that God would preserve His Word, we know that God was superintending the transmission of the Old Testament, and God led the Jewish rabbis, even in their unbelief and spiritual blindness, to preserve the Masoretic Bible. (For an extensive study on Bible preservation see our book Faith vs. the Modern Bible Versions.)
The Jewish authorities that operate the Shrine of the Book believe that the exhibition of the Aleppo Codex is the fulfillment of Isaiah 2:3: “... for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (“The Wandering Book: The Aleppo Codex,” http://www.english.imjnet.org.il/htmls/article_450.aspx?c0=13806&bsp=13246&bss=13806&bscp=12940, viewed May 5, 2010).
In fact, this great prophecy will be fulfilled at the return of Christ when “the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it” (Isaiah 2:2). It is obvious that this does not refer to our day when Israel is one of the most despised of nations on the face of the earth!
Both the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Aleppo Codex have been digitized and are available at the Israel Museum’s web site: http://www.imj.org.il/shrine_center/
SALE: CHRIST'S MESSAGES TO THE SEVEN CHURCHES
It has been nearly 2,000 years since the Apostle John received Christ’s message to these churches, but never have the messages been any more pertinent than they are today. In this video series, David Cloud examines each of the churches of John's day for clues as to where our churches stand today. How would your church measure up under the gracious but penetrating eye of the Lord Jesus Christ? It is a question that bears asking in these last days.
This series contains messages - one for each of the churches and an overview of the series.
Unlike many series on this topic, this is not purely informational or historical, but rather a strong exhortation to be ready for the Lord’s return.
This series is perfect for a Sunday School, special meetings, family viewing, or your own personal devotions.
DVDs are only $19.95 (regularly $29.95)
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Note: the Bible verses were gotten from Chick Publications "Scripture Preservation"
Are the Scriptures just the "ideas" of God, or are they the very WORDS of God? You decide!
This doesn't sound like God inspired only the "concepts" in Scripture. He clearly directed every word and will not tolerate man's meddling with it. He calls them "His Words."
If your Bible is a King James Bible, it preserves God's words because it was translated using "formal equivalence." All other Bibles were translated using "dynamic equivalence," in which the translator is free to change words as long as he conveys the "idea."
Read the above Scriptures again. Which kind of Bible do you think God wants you to have?
...Are the Scriptures just the "ideas" of God, or are they the very WORDS of God? You decide!
Scripture Preservation
Are the Scriptures just the "ideas" of God, or are they the very WORDS of God? You decide! | God promises to preserve His words. | The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever. (Psalms 12:6-7) |
| You shall not add or take away, says God. | Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the judgments, which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land which the LORD God of your fathers giveth you. Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you. (Deuteronomy 4:1-2) |
| God cares about every one of His words. | Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar. (Proverbs 30:5-6) |
| God's words will never pass away. | Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. (Jesus Christ, Son of God) (Mark 13:31) |
| God will curse those who change His Word. | For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. (Revelation 22:18-19) |
If your Bible is a King James Bible, it preserves God's words because it was translated using "formal equivalence." All other Bibles were translated using "dynamic equivalence," in which the translator is free to change words as long as he conveys the "idea."
Read the above Scriptures again. Which kind of Bible do you think God wants you to have?
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