THE Bible

Sorry I haven’t been posting very regularly the past few days. I guess if I don’t have much to say, I won’t post much. No sense in me boring you with thoughtless rambling.

I was in a wedding this last weekend. A young man in the church we have been attending got married and asked me to stand up with him as a groomsman. Not a big deal. The wedding was not held in our church for size reasons. Our church is much too small to hold all of the people that attended; and also this church was closer to the bride’s home. Getting to my point…in the hallway of this church they had a table set up for sign-up sheets and free literature and so forth. What struck me was the Bibles. They had several different Bibles set up with price tags on them. It just confused me. If someone needed a Bible, should we be selling it to them? In the church? Is there a price tag on Christianity? I have a problem with selling things in the church to begin with. Call me a conservative fundamentalist. But to sell the Bible in church. I have been trying to think back to all of the churches I’ve been in, if any of them have SOLD Bibles. I can’t think of any. I have been to churches that have bought boxes of Bibles in case someone needed one they could give it away. For crying out loud…we give Bibles away in the front lobby of my work, and I wouldn’t even call our company a ‘Christian’ company. We are a manufacturing facility! To SELL a Bible in church. I have given Bibles away to people at work who did not have one. We usually have several Bibles on hand at home. Not necessarily to give away, but we always have them on hand. I have even offered people my ‘good’ Bible because that’s the one I had with me at the time. You know, the one with real leather. The one with all of my personal notes. It is my belief that we need to flood the world with God’s word. Even if it’s at a financial ‘loss’. If our financial loss is their spiritual gain, to me it is well worth it. If someone reading this goes to a church that sells Bibles and can explain the concept, I am very eager to hear. Who knows, maybe if someone was in a real ‘need’ for a Bible, they would give one away.

I wonder what kind of a difference it would have made on Brother Andrew’s ministry if he would have sold Bibles behind the Iron Curtain as opposed to give them away? (If you don’t know who Brother Andrew is, get the book God’s Smuggler written by Brother Andrew. It’s a great read for the whole family! Those local to me can borrow it, or I‘ll give it away if it inspires you!!)

As a side note, the Bibles for sale were sitting right next to the sign-up sheet for Cheerleading Camp...maybe that sums it all up.

The second point to this post:

I got up yesterday morning with every intention of posting here. I grabbed a book (Experiencing the Presence of God by Charles Finney) off of our book shelf to see if God wanted me to share anything from there. Nothing. He was a great writer, but a lot of times he is a bit deep to just grab a paragraph here or there. So I went to another book. A book I purchased a while back but haven’t taken the opportunity to sit down and read. I started leafing through it and kind of got hooked. The next thing I know, it’s time to leave for work. I will probably be sharing from this book in the future. I am not a Biblical scholar, but this book confirms what I have believed for the past few years about the many Bible translations. I don’t intend on making any friends by saying that I believe the King James Bible is the only accurate Bible we have. Before you fly off the handle, I am not saying that people can’t get saved using the other translations, or that you can’t grow closer to the Lord using the other translations. From articles that I have read from resources that I trust, I believe that the KJV is the accurate one. The book is called Which Version Is The Bible? and was written by Dr. Floyd Nolen Jones , Th.D., Ph.D. On the copyright page, it reads this: “Neither Dr. Jones nor his family receives royalties or remuneration from the sale of this book. Its distribution is not a business venture, it is a ministry.” There are three questions on the front cover that he is tackling: Is the Word of God on planet earth today? If so, where is it? And , Why do the modern versions read so differently from all the older English versions? So far, I’m only through about 20 pages. It is very easy reading and very well organized. Just a sample, the back cover reads this:

“Nearly everyone has the impression that the difference in wording between modern translations and the 1611 King James Bible, as well as the other older English versions, is mainly due to synonym choices and language changes. Such is not the situation. The outrageous reason is that almost all translations since 1881 have been made from a drastically different Greek text than was used to prepare the older versions. The traditional Greek text has been replaced! Yet 90-95% of all extant Greek New Testament manuscripts agree with each other and the traditional text as well as the old versions, but they do not agree with the extremely few upon which the new Greek text is based.

The reason for this dismaying development is that modern textual critics have been seduced into accepting a theory whereby this “minority” text is said to contain older readings than those found in the vast majority. Being supposed older, the “minority” is deemed superior.

This exposé documents that such is not true and that the traditional majority Greek readings are the preserved original biblical text. Moreover, state of the art technology enabling the user to differentiate between twenty separate thin layers of a single papyrus sheet has allowed recent papyrology studies to take this time honored text back to around 66 AD - the time of Christ’s Apostles and nearly 300 years older than the manuscripts underlying the minority text!”

Well, that’s that. I also have another article that goes along with this one. Maybe I’ll get around to posting it tonight. I hope I don’t bore you with this, but I have had an interest in this for a while. I don’t want to stir up dissention, but I do believe this to be true. If you disagree, feel free to post a comment or send an e-mail.


God Bless!

“…holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord:” Heb. 12:14