Fulfill the Purpose of God's Word (Dennison)
In 1979, Dr. Jim Dennison served as a missionary in Borneo, East Malaysia, Southeast Asia. He talks about how he was given copies of the bible to give to the people and he'll never forget how, at the end of a long line, was an old woman who accepted the Word of God with trembling hands and tears flowing. G.I. Packard says "The Bible is God preaching" and St. Augustine says "The Bible is love letters from home". At http://www.pcbc.org/audio, Dr. Dennison hopes that we would receive the Word of God with trembling voices and with shaking hands. In the first of a 9-part (intense) Bible study series, "Unlocking the Word", Dr. Dennison introduces what he believes to be the first key to life changing bible study; "Fulfill the purpose of the Word as we read the Word." It'd be hard to play golf with a tennis ball. Using a cookbook to fix a car would be useless. Sometimes when we read the Bible, there are many things we misinterpret simply in understanding the PURPOSE of the Word. 1) The Bible is God's book. He is the author and He intends for us to understand and apply his truths. Bible means "book" drawn from Biblios. Biblios was a plant that was used to make some of the first pages of the bible. We understand the Bible to be God-breathed. It is not a book reserved for professionals, it is for us all to be able to understand. 2) It is a Revealing book. God originally revealed Himself in His creation. But when sin entered the picture, all of creation fell. Then God revealed Himself (and it revealed who we are) in His Word. It is about hope, answers and His love. If we are studying the bible just to learn about history or Jesus, we are missing the higher purpose of meeting God. 3) It is an Insired book, or "God-breathed", as in 2 Timothy. It is divine and humane as well with the personalities of God's followers like Luke, who uses medical language, Matthew, who quotes old testament passages and Paul, who writes task-letters. But there's a divine human mystery to the Word. We can believe every word. 4) It is the Authoritative Word of God. Jesus, in Matthew says, "Heaven and earth may pass away, but my Word will never pass away." Biblical authority in our lives is not genuine if it is not life-transforming. We must be willing to obey what God reveals. God did not intend for this to be an option for us. It is our authority. 5) The Bible is a Miraculous book. It is a miracle in itself, because of how it was recorded, preserved and canonized just to get into our hands. The ancient paper, Papirus, was a reed along the Nile River. There was an intricate process of turning this into paper. But over time, Papirus would whither and not stand the test of time as it was brittle. More important documents were written clay, pottery or stone, known as Ostricom (spelling?). About two centuries BC, parchment of sheep and goat skin was developed. Important books were transferred from papirus to parchment. So God used the writing materials of the day to get His Word to us. But He did this with language as well. The old testament is almost entirely written in Hebrew, which reads from right to left. The second language of the Word is Aramaic, the spoken word of Jesus' time. Ezra and Daniel are written in Aramaic. The New Testament is written in Greek, the language of the entire Western world. There are no originals of the books we read because of the nondurable materials. But this is true for all writings, such as Aristotle. The best way to confirm that copies were correctly made from originals is to compare copies. For Aristotle, there are only 5 known copies of his original works and the oldest was made 1300 years after his writings. For the New Testament, there are 5,000 copies in Greek and 10,000 copies in other Ancient languages. The oldest fragments we have are 40 years after the original and the oldest complete New Testament is only 300 after the original!! A scholar friend of Dennison's estimates that we have about 99.2% the original New Testament. The remaining .8% actually deals in spelling and other like-errors. There is no other book in all of literature preserved like the Bible. How did all the books we discovered come to be in the Bible? This was a process called "canonization". Canon means "rule" or "ruler" in Hebrew. This was the rule used to determine which books were to be included. We start with the first 5 books of the Old Testament, which was "the Law", referred to as the Pentateuch or Torah (spelling?). The second part is "the Prophets", or the Nebeheem; essentially being the life and times of the prophets. Finally came "the Writings" like Psams & Proverbs. By the first century A.D., the Jewish community had unanimously agreed on which books would make up the Old Testament. Interestingly, the Jews arrange these books differently. Although Genesis is common to the Christian order, the last book of the Jewish faith is 2 Chronicles. Our twelve minor prophet books are just one in theirs. While we have split many books into two parts, they do not. They don't split Ezra and Nehemiah as well. Now we come to the 400-year period between Malachi and Matthew, the "Intertestamental period". Fifteen books were written in Greek, by Jews, during this time called the Apocrypha (spelling?). If you've ever wondered why the Catholic bibles have books that we don't have, it's because they come from the Apocrypha. The Jews in Alexandria, Egypt accepted them as divine scripture, unlike the Jews in Palestine. About 200 BC, scholars translated the Old Testament into Greek and accepted these books into their "Septuagent". This is how they got into the Catholic Bible. When the Protestant Reformation came along in the 16th century, Luther and the reformers pointed out that these 15 books were never accepted by the Jews in Palestine, were not accepted by the Jews of the day and none of them are quoted in the New Testament. So he did not include the 15 books in his version. Matthew is "the bridge" to the Old Testament because it tries to convince the Jews by quoting a lot of the Old Testament. Mark was actually probably written first. Mark and Luke try to convince the Greeks that Jesus was the King and Savior. John was written to convince the entire world. Acts is the story of the expansion of the ancient church. Next come the 13 writings of Paul, not ordered chronologically, but from longest to shortest. Romans is the longest; Philemon is the shortest! Following the writings of Paul are the General Letters and, finally, Revelation. But how did these books get into the New Testament? Well, in order to be included, a book had to 1) be either recorded by an eye witness or based on eye witness testimony. 2) It had to possess merit and use. 3) It had to come to wide acceptance. So, through this long lasting and complicating process, the Bible is a book we can trust. One last fact is 6) the Bible is a challenging book. For instance, what do we do with scripture like we find in Exodus, which says a child who curses his parents shall be put to death? Saul used mediums. David had five wives. Their are debates about warfare like turning the other cheek. Hermaneutics, from "Hermes" the messenger of God, is using principles for interpreting the bible; understanding the history, the culture, the deliverer, the receiver etc to understand the context of scripture. Special Hermeneutics applies to such books Proverbs & Revelations. This process allows us to understand the Bible for what it was truly meant to say. It must be studied before we can understand what it means for us. Invest time and effort. The ultimate purpose of this book is that we meet God. John Calvin had a prayer he offered when he opened the Word: "Oh Lord, Heavenly Father, in whom is the fullness of Light and Wisdom, enlighten our minds by Your Holy Spirit and give us Grace to receive your Word with reverence and humility, without which no one can understand your Truth. For Christ's sake, Amen."
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