God’s Perfect Word
The Preservation of the Holy Scriptures
Psalm 12:6-7
Intro: The last time we meet, we examined evidence for the inspiration of the Word of God. We learned the blessed truth that God literally “breathed” His Word through man to give us an inerrant, infallible and inspired record of His revelation of Himself and of His Son Jesus Christ.
Lets review some of the terms we talk about last week in our study, and I would like to add a new term to list.
Revelation - The process by which man heard from God exactly what God wanted written down.
Inspiration - The process of man actually writing down what God wanted said. This is God filtering His Word through human personality.
Illumination - The process by which God uses the inspired record of the revelation of Himself to speak to the hearts of humanity.
To this list, I would like to add the word Preservation. This is the process by which God has supernaturally protected His word through many reproductions and translations. The idea of preservation holds that God has faithfully superintended His Word down through the ages, so that even today, some 3,500 years after portions of the Bible were written down, we can say that what we possess, what we love and what we read are the very words of God!
Now, we have already discovered the tremendous truth that the original manuscripts, that is, the writings of the original authors were divinely inspired. Sadly, none of those original manuscripts have survived to this day. In other words, you can’t go anywhere in this world and find a scrap of paper containing the actual writings of Paul, John, Moses, Peter, James, Daniel, Isaiah or any of the other biblical writers. Since that is true, how can we be confident that the Bibles we possess today are in fact accurate and are the very Word of God? Just as the inspiration of the Scriptures can be decisively proven using both the internal evidence of the Bible itself and the external sources of historical and scientific evidence, it can also be proven that the Bible has been divinely preserved down to this very day. With that in mind, let’s take some time this evening to examine this issue of The Preservation of the Holy Scriptures.
I. Scripture has been Preserved by God’s Promises
Let’s examine the internal evidence from the Bible itself. The Bible contains several passages that affirm God’s intention to preserve His inspired Word for all generations.
A. Old Testament Promises Of Preservation
• Psalm 12:6-7, “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.”
• Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?”
• Psalm 89:34, “My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.”
• Isaiah 40:8, “The grass withers, the flower fades: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”
• Psalm 119:89, “For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.”
B. New Testament Promises Of Preservation
• Matthew 5:18, “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one title shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”
• Matthew 24:35, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”
• Titus 1:2, “In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;”
• 1 Peter 1:25, “But the word of the Lord endures for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.”
C. To my mind, the conclusion from these verses is crystal clear: God had indeed promised to preserve His Word!
• The internal evidence is overwhelming!
o I have given you nine passages that explicitly state God’s intentions in this matter.
• The question I have for you is this: How many times does God have to say anything before we can conclude that He means it?
o Once!
• We have the promise of God, Who cannot lie, Heb. 6:18, Who identifies Himself as the “Faithful and True Witness”, Rev. 3:14, that He will forever perfectly preserve His Word, and that is good enough for me.
o However, while that may be all the evidence Bible believers need, that is not all the evidence we have!
II. SCRIPTURE HAS BEEN PRESERVED BY GOD’S POWER
A. Jeremiah 36:1-32 tells the story of God giving Jeremiah revelation and inspiration to write a portion of the Word of God.
• Jeremiah writes as he is commanded and king Jehoiakim listens to the word of God.
o He receives illumination from the Lord, but he rejects the message.
o He takes the scroll Jeremiah has written and he literally cuts it to pieces and burns it in the fireplace, Jer. 36:23.
o Apparently, he thinks that destroying the written word will erase what God has said.
o However, God’s word is settled, not on earth, but in Heaven, Psa. 119:89.
o God merely sent His word again through the prophet Jeremiah, Jer. 36:28.
o Despite the actions of Jehoiakim, God preserved His Word!
• That is just one small picture of what God has always done in regard to protecting and preserving His Word down through the ages.
B. Down through the ages, there have been several concerted efforts by pagan unbelievers to eradicate the Word of God.
• In A.D. 303, the Roman emperor Diocletion ordered the confiscation and destruction of all the Christian scriptures.
o Thousands of early copies and possibly some original manuscripts were burned.
o However, the Word of God was not eradicated!
o Earnest believers protected the Word and hid it away in the catacombs, in caves and in graves.
o Thus the Word of God survived that attack!
• The French humanist Voltaire once said, "Another century and there will not be a Bible on the earth."
o Two centuries have gone, and the circulation of the Bible is one of the marvels of the age.
o After he died, his old printing press and the very house where he lived was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society and made a depot for Bibles.
o On December 24, 1933, the British Government bought a book called Codex Sinaiticus from the Russians for half a million dollars.
o On the same day, a first edition of Voltaire’s work sold for eleven cents in Paris bookshops.
• Joseph Stalin, this bloody butcher took over all of Russia upon the death of Lenin in the late twenties.
o From this point on until his death in the fifties, Stalin instituted a "ban the Bible."
o A purge from the U.S.S.R. such as had never been witnessed before.
o The miserable man literally attempted to wipe the Word of God and the God of the Word from the Russian people’s minds.
o Did he succeed?
o A recent poll taken in Russia shows that today more people than ever believe in God and His Word.
• For thousands of years the enemies of truth have sought to destroy the precious Word of God.
o Every attempt to do so has failed miserably as the Bible continues to be read and loved by millions of people.
C. In 1526, William Tyndale had produced the first English translation of the Bible to be printed on a printing press. This new version was hated by the Roman Catholic Church and in particularly by the Bishop of London. A certain man named John Packington, who knew the Bishop and his hatred of the Tyndale translation, but who was also secretly a friend of Tyndale, went to the Bishop of London and told him he knew how to get all of Tyndale’s Bibles. The Bishop told him to get them and that he would gladly pay whatever they cost. The Bishop of London promised to buy them with the intention of burning them at Paul’s Cross Cathedral in London. Packington went to Tyndale and told him of the deal he had made with the Bishop. Tyndale responded by saying that he knew the Bishop would burn his Bibles. However, printing the Bibles had left Tyndale deeply indebted.
Tyndale decided to sell the Bibles to the Bishop of London. He saw several advantages in doing so. First, he could use the money to pay his way out of debt and have even more Bibles printed. Secondly, when the people of England saw the Bishop of London burning the Word of God they would be come enraged. So, the enemy of the Word of God actually allowed Tyndale to pay off his debts, correct the text of his translation and print three times the number of Bibles that had been destroyed!
Later, when some of Tyndale’s associates were arrested and asked where they received the money to print their Bibles, they answered that the money came from the Bishop of London. This one instance is proof that God is able to preserve His Word despite the attempts of all its enemies to destroy it.
CLOSING:
I have merely scratched the surface of this matter of the preservation of the biblical text. However, I hope you can walk away this evening confident of the fact that you hold in your hands, and hopefully in your hearts, the very Word of God.
I close with this question: has God perfectly preserved His word to this day? All the evidence says He has! Therefore, read your Bible with confidence. Base your life upon it with assurance. It is the preserved and inspired Word of God! God has superintended His word through thousands of translations and copies. He has never re-inspired the Bible, but He has preserved His Word and He has preserved it in its inspired, infallible and inerrant form!
