Foundations of the Faith

 Week 7- The Authority of God’s Word

Day 1 – A Brief and incomplete History of the Bible

Excerpted “from Bible Studies for Firm Foundation” by Bob and Rose Weiner  

ISBN: 978-0-938558-45-3 PP. 73- 80

From Study 9: The Power and Authority of God's Word

The Bible is the greatest storehouse of Truth in the world. It is the record of God's interaction with man since the beginning of time. The Bible is a copy of historical records and original biographies which are thousands of years old that tell of men and women who walked and talked with God. If you want to know about God's existence, about His plan for you, and about how you can know Him, no greater source can be found than the Bible.

How does the Bible compare as an accurate historical record in Western Literature?

Consider this list of the number of the oldest manuscripts in existence today.

The New Testament was written by eyewitnesses who listened to Jesus' teachings for over three years and saw Him after He rose from the dead.

Of these 24,000 Manuscripts:

5,000 Copies are in Greek

10,000 Copies are in Latin

9,000 Copies are in Ethiopian, Slavic, Armenian, Aramaic, and various languages.

Their accuracy?

When you compare these manuscripts of the New Testament, they all say the same thing. The manuscripts of the New Testament are the most accurate, authentic manuscripts in the possession of mankind today. All of Western Civilization that has been good and helpful to the human race was built from the Light and Truth of the Bible.

 The United States was founded by Christians who made the Bible the cornerstone of our Republic and believed that all men should be guided by the light of its Truth. Our Founders modeled their free form of self-government after Moses' representative government in the wilderness. In early America, the Bible was the main textbook in our schools. The Founders held the view that the Bible was crucial in maintaining individual freedom, good government, and our free Republic.

There is something in the Bible that is so powerful that it has been banned by those who have threatened the rights of men down through the centuries. It is historical fact that wherever governments, tyrants, dictators, or false religious leaders are determined to keep people in bondage and force them to believe what the state wants them to believe, there is a war against the Bible. There is obviously something in the Bible they don't want people to know.

What Do They Hate about the Bible?

Have you ever wondered exactly what there is in the Bible that makes oppressors of men so afraid? Let's consider the recent example of communist nations who based their national life on the political theory of Karl Marx coupled with the Darwinian theory of evolution. Marx and Darwin were both atheists who rejected the idea of God as Creator and Law Giver and exalted the theory of man as God. Marx's theory wreaked havoc in the 20th century. Historically, every Marxist government has made it a crime for people to own a Bible. It was so in the former Soviet Union and in China. Why? Because everything about Marx's political theory is opposed to God's Truth as it is revealed in the Bible.

By the 1970s, almost one-third of the world had fallen to Marxist communism. Western civilization did not escape the icy fingers of Marx and Darwin that reached out from the grave to rule the minds of men. In the early part of the 20th century, the United States had its own group of men and women who were enamored with Marxism and devoted to Darwinism who called themselves Progressives. Headed by John Dewey these educators and politicians wanted to change the direction of our nation from a Christian Republic and make it a secular, socialist state. To accomplish this, they decided to use the public schools. Dewey and his friends presented a document called the Humanist Manifesto, in which they stated that one of their goals to improve the education of children was to remove the Bible and the Christian religion from the public classroom so that children could become more enlightened and progressive. Dewey had such an influence that he became known as the Father of American Education. It is important to understand this because this philosophy succeeded in shaping our public schools and universities and changing our national life. For this reason, many Christians hold Marxist ideas that are in direct opposition to the truth of the Bible, and they don't even know it. In fact, Christians often view the Bible through the dark glasses of Marxist theory.

The Power and Authority of God's Word

Let's separate the precious from the vile and make a comparison between what Karl Marx taught that is still being propagated today and what the Bible teaches. Marxist theory teaches that the end justifies the means. The Bible says, No! God gives us a standard of right and wrong. Wrong can never produce right. If the root is bad, so is the fruit. Marxist theory teaches the redistribution of wealth - take from those who have and give it to those who have not. The Bible says, No! People have a right to private ownership of property which is as sacred as the laws of God. People have a right to keep the fruit of their labor. The eighth and tenth Commandments are: "Do not steal. Do not covet what belongs to your neighbor." It is your work that should be rewarded. The Bible teaches that laziness will result in poverty.

The Bible teaches us to care about people. God wants us to prosper and tells us to help others in need out of our surplus. The Bible teaches this is to be a freewill offering, not something taken by force or coercion. Marxism teaches the opposite and raises its citizens to be wards of the state who are to depend upon the state to meet all their needs. The Bible says, No! You are to look to God as your Savior and Provider. The Bible tells us not to trust in man or look to man to meet our needs, but to "seek the kingdom of God first and His righteousness and everything we need will be given to us."

Marxism teaches that rights and privileges are granted and regulated by the state. The Bible says, No! The rights of life and liberty are given by God. He is the Author of all Liberty, and He has come to proclaim Liberty to all the earth's captives. The Bible says that you are God's free man and woman and that you are to "Stand up in the liberty with which Christ has made you free and don't be entangled in the yoke of bondage." Marxist socialism teaches people to wait for direction and guidance from the state - do not act without being told or without consulting an expert. The Bible says, No! When you lack wisdom, ask God and He will give you the wisdom you need.

Marxism teaches that the group action is more important than the individual effort - wait for the group to act, make sure everything you do is in agreement with the group. The Bible says, No! The believer is to act immediately in obedience to the Voice of God's Spirit within, even if it means standing alone. The Bible teaches that when it comes to the time of choosing, "We must obey God and not man." Individual salvation is what counts. The Bible says that it is the individual in fellowship with God who can change the world. God calls the individual to be His disciple and gives each person his or her special mission. The individual has a personal responsibility for himself and his or her actions. Individuals are required by God to not be lazy, but to be good stewards of everything God has given them, and to multiply their gifts and talents by putting them to good use.

Marxism teaches that there is no God - the state or the individual is God. The Bible says, No! There is One God to whom all people owe allegiance and to whom each person must answer. Marxism teaches that history is moving people to a socialist state where everyone is equal in property and wealth, where there is no distinction, and everyone is entitled to the  same wages, privileges, and recognition, regardless of whether they are diligent and industrious, or thoughtless and lazy. The Bible says, No. The Bible makes a distinction in reward between a life poorly spent and a life well-lived, not only in this world but in the world to come. The Bible teaches that there is a distinction between those who are faithful and those who are unfaithful. The Bible teaches that the curse of poverty is in the earth and gives us the remedy of how to escape it - let each person turn to God and receive His blessing. He is the one who "opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living creature." Each person will live a blessed or cursed life on this earth depending on whether that person obeys God's commands and loves God or not.

The Bible also teaches that in the world to come all things will not be equal. Each person who has received Jesus as their Savior will be rewarded for their work, their good deeds, their obedience to God's commands, and their faithful service to Christ. Each person will reap what they have sown. Those who have loved Jesus and have followed Him will enter into the joys of heaven and life everlasting. Jesus warned in a visitation to John, His apostle, on the Isle of Patmos: "Cowards who turn away from Me, and unbelievers, and the corrupt, and murderers, and the immoral, and those who practice witchcraft, and idol worshipers, and all liars - their doom is in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur. This is the second death" (Revelation 21:8). Marx teaches that communism is the great pinnacle toward which all history is moving. The Bible says, No! All of history is moving toward the day when "the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ and He shall reign forever."

The War against the Bible

The 20th and 21st centuries aren’t the first centuries to oppose the Bible. Down through history, there has been a war against the Bible. Christians have been imprisoned, burned at the stake, beheaded, and persecuted for to publish the Bible or preach from its pages. During the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, Europe burst into flames over efforts to translate the Bible from the archaic language of Latin into the language of the people. More Christians were executed over attempting to publish and preach the Bible than those who were thrown to the lions by Caesar and his cohorts in the church's infancy. It is estimated that 50 million people died during the Protestant Reformation for seeking to worship God according to the dictates of their heart and conscience. (David Plaisted, Estimates of the Number Killed by the Papacy, <www.cs.unc.eduj +plaistedy estimates.doc»

Why the resistance to the Bible? The Bible was scarce and few of the church leaders had ever read it, consequently Europe was controlled by the Roman Catholic Church that in those days taught the traditions of man for the commandments of God. Many of these traditions were contradicted by the Bible. Those who taught biblical truth that was contrary to tradition were persecuted, hunted down, imprisoned, and killed like common criminals.

In The Power and Authority of God's Word the 1500s, the printing press was invented, and in spite of this great persecution, the first book printed was the Bible. Most people of that era could not read or write, but when the Bible was made available to the masses, people all over Europe put forth every effort to learn to read, so they could read God's Holy Word for themselves. When they read the Bible, they realized that many things they believed about God were incorrect. In the midst of this persecution over preaching, publishing, and reading the Bible, Martin Luther, 16th century reformer and Father of the Protestant Reformation, penned: The Bible is the proper book for men. There the Truth is distinguished from error far more clearly than anywhere else, and one finds something new in it every day. For twenty-eight years, since I became a doctor, I have now constantly read and preached the Bible; and yet I have not exhausted it. There I began to understand that the righteousness of God by which the righteous love is a gift of God, and is received namely by faith ... There I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered the gates of paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me ... the work of God, what God does in us, the power of God, with which He makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which He makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, and the glory of God. You should diligently learn the Word of God and by no means imagine that you know it. Let him who is able to read, take a psalm in the morning, or some other chapter of Scripture, and study it for a while. This is what I do. When I get up in the morning, I pray and recite the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer with the children, adding any one of the Psalms. I do this only to keep myself well acquainted with these matters, and I do not want to let the mildew of the notion grow that I know them well enough. The devil is a greater rascal than you think he is. His definite design is to get you tired of the Word and in this way to draw you away from it. This is his aim." (LW 34:33, WA 32, 64f).

While Martin Luther was not correct in everything he said and did, in particular his persecution of the Jews, he championed a great deal of truth for every believer for which we should be forever grateful. Luther recovered and propagated the truth that all those who believe are saved through faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ alone. He also championed the concepts of the priesthood of every believer and the right of every individual - even a plowboy - to read and understand the Bible for himself. Luther translated the Bible into German. William Tyndale was burned at the stake for working to translate the Bible into English. Nonetheless, this translated Bible was smuggled into England. Because of Tyndale's sacrificial work, English-speaking people were able to read the Bible in their mother tongue. Having read the Scriptures for themselves, many saw that the state church of England was little better than the church of Rome and equally persecuted nonconformists. Finally, in the 17th century, the Pilgrims and Puritans set sail for the shores of North America to start the world over again and to establish a nation where freedom to worship God would be the heritage of all.

We should never forget that our nation was founded by Christians who fled the tyranny of the Old World, seeking religious freedom and the rights to read, preach, and practice the teaching of the Bible. Through the sacrifice of these great Christians, we live in a nation where everyone is free to read and own as many Bibles as they want. Our Founding Fathers viewed the truths of the Bible as the cornerstone and foundation of all our liberty and were insistent that the Bible be read in our nation's schools. In the 18th century, the first book printed in the USA was a Bible published for our schools by our national Congress. Congress believed that the teachings of the Bible showed people right from wrong and taught them love for their fellow man. They believed that the Bible elevated our thoughts, softened our manners, and taught our individual responsibility to our Creator. George Washington, the Father of Our Country and the first President of the United States wrote, "It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible." Noah Webster, author of the American Dictionary of the English Language and one of the framers of the U.S.

Constitution, said, "All the misery that men suffer come from neglecting the precepts of the Bible." Patrick Henry noted for his work for American Independence, spoke these immortal words about resisting the oppression of the British King, "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" He also said, "The Bible is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever penned." In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln wrote, "The Bible is the best book ever given to men." This was our national faith until an attack began to overturn it in the beginning of the 20th century. As mentioned earlier, the warfare against the Bible that was going on in the Marxist nations moved front and center to the United States. Humanist educators were convinced that the Bible had to be eliminated from the American classroom at all costs. False teaching worked its way into the churches. Doubt was cast on the Bible's accuracy and importance. Christians were taught to focus on their own spiritual life. They withdrew from the culture that was opposed to God. They were told, "Politics are dirty; stay out of them." As a result, Christians in North America began to withdraw their stewardship over the public arena. Christians lagged behind in statesmanship and civic and cultural leadership. They became focused on their own personal lives, their pietistic devotional life, and heaven. Some even believed that as things got worse - which was a certainty if the Christians give up leadership - it was a sure sign that Jesus was coming soon and everyone should be glad about it. Christians were lured to sleep and no longer tried to disciple our nation and teach it to obey Christ's teaching of love and life. The devil and evil men had a field day. While

Christians were sleeping, by the early 1970s, the secular humanist educators realized their dream, and the Bible became a banned book in American public schools. Not a single Christian showed up at the Supreme Court to interpose an objection when the liberty to read the Bible in our public schools had its hearing. Soon it became illegal to offer public prayer in the classroom to the God Who made us. Following this, the Ten Commandments were taken down from the classroom walls. As one educator commented: "If children read these commandments, they will think they have to obey them, and this will just not do!" What philosophy did the Progressives put in the place of biblical truth? The theories of Darwin and Marx. As Darwinists, they viewed people as descended from the monkey, and as Marxists, they went to war against the power of the individual and truth itself. They believed that there were no moral absolutes because there is no Divine Creator or Absolute Law Giver. Since there was no God to answer to, there was no such thing as the devil or heaven and hell. They taught that all truth is relative. My truth may not be your truth. Truth is evolving and ever changing. Since there are no moral absolutes, people are free to be whomever they want to be and do whatever they want to do. Whatever a person needs to do to further what he or she thinks is best is totally permissible, if it is for a good end.

Up until the 1970s, the greatest offenses in the public classroom were chewing gum, talking in class, throwing paper wads, or being in the hallway when the study bell rang. Now our children have become the victims of sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy. Sexual deviancy is applauded and encouraged. Students have to pass through metal detectors to enter the public classroom where they often become the victims of drug peddling, theft, murder, and other sordid crimes. And to add insult to injury, many students graduate without basic reading and math skills. To all this ideology the Bible says, No! The

Bible teaches that each person is created in the image of God. Each person owes God their obedience and allegiance. Each person has been put here to be a part of God's plan, and each person must answer to God for the way they live their lives and use their talents. Because of this false teaching, we have lost a large portion of the liberty and religious freedom that our Founders worked so tirelessly to win. We must work to gain it back, and yes, we can succeed because the Truth is on our side. We can take courage from the center of Marxist thought, the former Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the tide began to turn in Soviet Russia against Marx that would relegate Marxism to the dustbin of history. As Marxism proved to be an abject failure, a great spiritual awakening broke out in these former atheistic nations, and the Bible rose once again from the dead. Where the Bible had been a forbidden book, the Bible is now required reading in the public classroom. These former Marxists nations learned that there is something valuable within the pages of the Bible after all. How is that for the power of the Bible to conquer and prevail! Eighteenth century writer, William Cullen Bryant, said it this way: "Truth crushed to the earth will rise again/ The eternal years of God are hers;/But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,/ And dies among his worshippers.

In the public arena in the United States today, the war is still raging against the Bible as humanists continue to question its accuracy and promote the idea that the Bible is contradictory, archaic, boring, and irrelevant. The cosmic battle continues between the Truth and the Lie - between "God said!" and Satan's probing question, "Did God really say?" The only way we can be captured by the devil's lies is to not know what God has said. What a great blessing that God's words have been recorded for us in the Bible by men who knew Him. And best of all, in the privacy of our own homes, we still have the privilege of freely learning from its pages every day. Jesus upheld the truth of Scripture and quoted from it throughout His ministry. Jesus reminds us, "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make your free!" The Bible has the power to transform our way of thinking, to set us free from the law of sin and death, and to purge us from socialist Marxist dogma that has infected our way of thinking. The Bible is a place we can encounter the Living Christ as He breathes His transforming Word into our hearts through the revelation of the Holy Spirit. The greatest crime we can commit against ourselves and our spiritual progress and the progress of Christ's kingdom in this world is to let the Bible sit and gather dust on our library shelf.

Discussion Questions:

Day 1 – A Brief and incomplete History of the Bible

• Do you think that the Bible is the Word of God? Explain why or why not.

• Is everything in the Bible relevant to us today? Explain why or why not.

• Does the Bible create arguments or settle them? Explain.