Ferguson, Godfrey, Jones, Lutzer, MacArthur, and Sproul: Questions and Answers #2

you I had this thought one time about a new believer who goes into a Christian bookstore to buy a Bible and the person says well what Bible do you want he says well I want I'm just a new believer I want to learn he says well are you charismatic and I encouraged me I said well I don't know I want to be a Bible well are you premillennial or amillennial I don't know I I'm just a new believer I want to read a Bible you know do you infant baptize or believers whatever and this whole thing goes on that the guy is trying to narrow down what he believes so he can then sell him a Bible that's been designed to sort of pigeonhole his market niche and someone asks the question of you here how would a new believer go about finding the best translation do you have some keys for a person that is trying to get a good Bible and how what should they look for in a translation the issues involved in translation as you know well Paul are not easily solved there's no magic wand one of the first things I ever dealt with in publications myself were not books that I wrote on my own but I had to prepare like 18 articles for the Encyclopedia of Christianity where my job was to translate theological articles that had been written in Dutch into English and and the course working from one language to another whether it's Greek or Hebrew or Dutch whatever that you're dealing with you soon discover that there is no way that you can give a one-to-one verbal correspondence from one language to another now because the Bible itself tells us that that we are to live by every word that proceeds forth from the mouth of mouth of God obviously every word of Sacred Scripture in its original has important import to us and so the task historically of most translations and translators to stay as close as possible to verbal accuracy and yet at the same time wrestling with the problem of fluidity of and readability one of the finest translations is the new American Standard Bible but it's rarely used in the churches it's often used in the study but not in the churches because it lacks a lyrical flowing prose to it one of the beauties of the King James of course was that it tried to work on as close as possible to the verbal equivalency and yet at the same time and there was a mastery of language well as different translations go you have what's now called the dynamic equivalency approach which is the approach of the NIV which is not concerned all that much about verbal accuracy but rather they want to translate the Bible thought for thought and that's what you have to do when you go into a foreign culture where the where you go to a tribe where they've never even had their own language written down and so on you try that's what dynamic equivalency is how do I communicate this idea that I find here in Scripture in the Greek language to a person who is not familiar with these concepts and so the goal I think is a godly goal - we want to communicate this as clearly as possible unfortunately the further you get away from verbal correspondence the greater the opportunity of bias coming in the closer you get to paraphrase in one sense this is the bad news every translation is a commentary that's unavoidable but that's why we don't believe in the divine verbal inspiration of translations King James or anybody else good so it's not an easy problem to deal with and so the first thing I would say to that young Christian is try to find a Bible that operates on the basis of a genuine attempt to be as close verbally to the original as you can get and secondly or maybe even firstly go to your pastor and have your pastor help you with this with this question I wouldn't just Center the bookstore and say go find yourself a Bible any thing you would recommend John and I that's come up it is disgraceful to go into a Christian bookstore and look at the Bible section I mean it is an it is an assault on the Word of God it that the Word of God is literally obliterated as as he was saying under the the sheer silliness that trivializes its seriousness by these various kinds of Bible editions and I think the saddest part of it is it generally in a bookstore you don't have the staff who have any idea of what this all means it's all about how they can sell whatever happens to be promoted and so the proliferation continues and we didn't talk about that but that that is a form of the assault the war on the word another individualizes then gone bad too I mean there was a reason for some early translations and but that but the real reason for all of these kinds of Bibles you know the Holy Ghost left-handed Bible for bowlers or whatever it is that whatever kind of Bible the reason for all of that is money it's just a marketing ploy it's a weighted it's a way to prostitute the message of God to market it and I mean certainly we want to get the Bible out there but but these things are they're devious means to market the Word of God John at the event RB Jim Dobson was accosted by somebody who was complaining to him about his criticism of the t NIV saying it's not fair because you haven't ever said anything against the New Living Bible which is also following the same pattern and Jim Thompson said you're right and I'm sorry about that I should have said something about that one as well but I mean it's not just t NIV that's that's the point now R see last year you put out a book on what the Bible is about what's in the vial what's in the Bible you have one annoying scripture should we have some more recommendations here of good books to help people start making those connections that bob was talking about this morning well those two resources as you mentioned knowing Scripture which is the oldest older was one of my widest selling books I've ever written because the whole purpose of it is is to not tell people what's in the Bible but how to follow the classical rules for interpreting the Bible so that you don't turn it into a wax nose and so on and it's written basically for laymen the what's in the Bible that you mentioned was a joint venture with Robert Walker booth where we had done a thing in Ligonier on video and audio series called dust to glory an overview of the content of the scope of redemptive history beginning in Genesis and going to Revelation because like like Bob said people don't they're not even familiar with the forest and I get that you get lost you got to see that the big picture before the little picture makes sense to you and I don't spend a lot of time in Leviticus in that series which is too bad because there's a time where after you've gone at the big picture and now you return to what at first was arcane and difficult such as Leviticus and you find - all the riches of that stuff in there that's so crystal logically oriented you know but at the beginning person student is not going to see that and they get they get intimidated by its nature and so so the whole purpose of what's in the Bible whoa I didn't even write it Robert water both wrote it using a lot of his materials and a lot of the materials from dust to glory and he said he wanted to write it in such a way that his mother could understand it and then I was sort of there's to give the knee Hill ops that you know theological e to it but there are there other books like that that but the I think we need to help our people become acquainted with the basic content we spend so much time about the doctrine of Scripture and prolegomena questions of of the ancient life situation that sits in lave and critical questions of dating and authorship and all that and the people never get a chance to learn what's in there and so that's what we have to do John you must have a comment on this well as a pastor I constantly face the fact that I'm in a slow flow of teaching through the New Testament I didn't know that John Calvin never taught the Old Testament in the morning but I have always felt that way and I've never taught an Old Testament book in the morning because I always have felt I was a minister of the New Covenant and that my responsibility primarily was to unfold the mysteries as was Paul's but that those things that happened happened as examples and so you you that's the main stuff and then you you fill in the rest and but in the flow of our situation the flow is very slow so you could have people come in at any point in the flow of exposition and you've preached all those things before but it could be a decade before you ever got back to it so we have tried to develop and I think this is a critical area we have tried to develop a curriculum in our children's division to start with that is a block of insight into the big picture of the Word of God with appropriate depth so that children begin to absorb and learn in some kind of framework that goes from somewhere to somewhere else our youth ministry we try to design the path to cover the main issues and then we work with our adult support ministries in the fellowship groups as we call them to make sure that they're dealing with the cycling of issues then we have a ministry in our church called fundamentals of the faith it is a 16 week class no more than five people with a couple teacher mentor who takes them systematically through doctrine because that is the framework even catechism we use catechism with kids but even the catechism is just another way to explain doctrine so we put them through 16-week and it usually extends longer and it builds a life relationship because it's a kind of a dialogue environment they have a curriculum they work through we have found that that's their probably 35 or 40 of those classes going on all the time just running people through those frameworks and those basics and we use very kinds of books to suggest along the way one of the things I did in the Study Bible in the beginning was to write just a simple scheme that helps people to understand what the key points of Scripture are so they at least have some peaks as they move their way through there are there are endless kinds of books I would find any kind of a theological abstract something small even and I have an old copy of birkhoff's little theological abstract that's about that big that just hits the main issues Catechism is good anything that sums up doctrine and will be very helpful but in the end it's going to be the life of the church and the flow of the life of the church that's going to provide the opportunity for nurturing those people you have tape series just like our see if you want to get in on the ground floor with our see you go back you go back to the holiness of God you go back to dust to glory and you build that foundation there and then you build on top of that that's the wonderful thing about tapes and CDs and in books you can always get what you didn't hear because it's available dr. Lutzer we don't want to leave you out here you've got good pastoral wisdom here any thing you would recommend you mean in terms of for new Christians well for anyone who wants to make the connections that the whole talked about well I since I'm given the opportunity and have been given a mic I could say something good about moody press about two months ago they came out with the first volume in a four volume set by Colin Smith entitled the Bible's story and I've looked at the first volume and I think it's excellent what he really does is he does tell the story of the Bible in terms of highlights and we think as a staff that this is going to be a wonderful thing for new Christians because it's going to give them the story it's going to get them into the word and they're going to understand the big picture before they begin to analyze the details so as has been said I think there are many many things out there that can help new Christians but absolutely getting the big picture and getting a framework you have to do it I think it's so important that our children not think that the Bible is just one collection of interesting stories I mean the stories are there but the stories are within a framework of what God is doing and I think that needs to be emphasized and that has to be emphasized in our preaching to st. Claire let me direct a question to you the questioner writes in light of dr. Ferguson's principle of putting greater priority on the clear passages and obviously less importance on the obscure passages is it really important what our position is on the end times I was somewhat confused about pre-meal post-meal whatever mill thinking but after the Ligonier conference two years ago I've been utterly confused this is directed I guess to you because they're picking up on your comment today well there are people around me more qualified to speak on millennial issues than I am nobody in Scotland ever asks me period and that's the way I like it I would think I would say two things Paul there there's big eschatology and they're small eschatology millennial issues belong to eschatology with a small e but the big eschatology is that Christ by his death and resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit has brought in the last days and we are living in them what may take place at the end of those last days is the mopping up operation and it's very I think it's absolutely critical for us to understand that perspective and that enables us then to view differences and disagreements that we may have about the details of the mopping up process within the proper context and I think often the church has been sidelined on the narrow elements of this whole period of the last days and very much lost a sense that we are living in the last days and you know when you read I I remember a friend who was originally a dentist which is mythic why he wanted to tell me this but it's now a minister saying to me he had read somewhere a comment about the early fathers that it was regarded as a heresy not too long daily for the return of the Lord and that is something I think that's promoted much more by the notion that we're in the last days than it is promoted by the notion will Christ come before the Millenium are we in the Millennium will he come after the Millennium those things are those things are minor details actually now when people ask us questions in this panel it may sound as though they are major things only major things because somebody has asked as a question because they're major things in the mind of the question you know overall in the whole biblical picture they are relatively minor things and I think you know the fact that we're all sitting here a apart from Bob Godfrey we're all crossing our legs in exactly the same way is an is an indication keep them that way I think I think that's an indication of what of our I wish I knew it is an indication of our ability frail and fragile we are to see the difference between the things that are totally clear in Scripture and to place upon them the whole of our intellectual and emotional weight and to recognize that there are things that are not so clear in Scripture and at least in my own view deliberately not so clear in Scripture to underline for us that they don't belong to the center of the core of the gospel but to the mopping up operations of the gospel Erwin you wanted to comment just for the person who wrote about pre-meal post mill I attended a seminary that knows very well exactly how it's going to happen and I used to have a professor by the name of dr. Unger you remember the ungar's Bible Dictionary and so forth and since I impersonate people I can do a line of him too he used to talk in a very interesting way and he used to always tell us that if we get to heaven and find out that premillennialism is wrong he said we'll simply have to say and then this is the way he would speak we'll have to say Lord forgive us for being so naive as to have believed your word he's incorrigible Ken well the questioner says you rightly pointed out the modern churches fascination with the anointing apostles and prophets and all of those things why do you think the modern church is so eager to have such phenomena in their midst what errors in the thinking of the modern church have made these things so attractive it's the oily forehead comment I'm sure I don't know exactly what's made it so popular but we have a we have a problem trusting and for some reason Bible says that we walk by faith and not by sight well in our fallen nature we want to walk by sight and anointings we can see oil in a jar we can see we we can see certain phenomena and if you look out look throughout the course of church history there's always been a gravitation towards the external and one of the amazing features of the Faith Movement is that it's the lease based on faith it's based on what you see how do you know that your faith is working for you according to their system based on what you see and and I think that's one of our shortcomings so we tend to be suckers so to speak for things that that validate or confirm what we think based on what we see we like prophets because now I have someone else's word that I can blame we like we like apostles because it sounds more official we like private and again I think it goes back to our individualism and the idea that God and to draw on what Bob spoke of earlier and I think rc-- will be dealing with tomorrow one of the problems with our personal interpretation of Scripture is that we tend to interpret Scripture according to us as individuals rather than God's covenant blessings or his covenant promises to his covenant people so we want we want the inside scoop we want the inside connection I think that was one of the reasons in the Old Testament that Israel continued and if you look at the idolatry of Israel it was never a matter of them consciously just rejecting Yahweh they wanted to worship Yahweh Plus and that was always the constant problem not realizing that by adding someone else to the table they were rejecting him and I think we fall modern evangelicals fall into the same trap who will ever whoever will give us the right answer first or give us the answer that we want to hear first is what we're inclined to listen to so anointing makes sense because it gives us something to do if you look at one of the questions that's raised in the New Testament when john preaches the gospel one of the first questions that people always ask is what do i have to do okay well run around the building that makes sense you know look in the Old Testament wouldn't name it when he was to be healed with prov of leprosy bathed yourself seven times in the Jordan River that doesn't make sense okay well if I told you something extra to do you would have done it well yeah that makes sense but it was through the simple things and that's what we don't we don't trust him so I think therefore we make ourselves us suckers for anyone with a good dog and pony show one final question that we have time your for and and maybe there's a chance for a comment from each of you or least several of you in our day it's been suggested that the reading of scripture in public is being done with decreasing frequency given Paul's charged Timothy in 1st Timothy 4:13 what would each of you address or would each of you addressed the importance of public reading of the scripture during corporate worship what is the your evaluation of the current state I suppose and would you encourage the reading of the Bible more in public worship or do you read it from I'm not oh my god most churches today I don't even find a place where I read the Bible from there's no pulpit you know when when the Jews came back from exile and the law was rediscovered what that Ezra do he had a scaffold built and he called a column assembly and it's sunup the people assembled while he read the law till midday while they were standing listening violating our seminaries teaching that you never read more than ten verses at a clip two people and and the reason he was in an elevated pulpit was that so that people could could hear the reading of the word of God but I wasn't I wasn't being just being facetious I can't believe I'll walk in churches all over the place today and I bet him is he a pulpit and and then you asked me why aren't people acquainted with the Word of God until the church recovers the law the Word of God and makes it central to the meeting together of the people in the reading and the proclamation of the word of God and the exposition of the Word of God we're going nowhere one or two other comments I would I would add one thing Paul we had an evangelist in our church from England John Blanchard I'm sure you know him and he has traveled in a lot of Baptist circles to Ken I think with the Southern Baptists and for many many years come to America half the year and gone over there half years written a wonderful book on whatever happened to hell and a new one on apologetics and he's really a just a good man he came to our church for a worship service and you know you get very we get very used to what we do he said in I don't know how many years 15 20 years he said ours was the first church he had preached in where someone actually read the scripture and I was stunned and shocked and he said it's done done maybe the preacher will quote it but the scripture is not read I mean I don't know how clear it can be until I come Paul said give attention to reading the scripture 1st Timothy 4 it has if I can use a 25 cent word perspicuity that felt good it's using that word in it we had a prompt earlier yeah we had from Sinclair yeah it has perspicuity it has and you used that with reference to the clear portions it has clarity and I will give one brief illustration I was reading some one day and unbeknownst to me I just read the somme with Psalm 101 oh five you remember anyway sitting in the back was one of the leaders of the gay pride parade in Los Angeles 25 years of homosexual dying of AIDS he had asked somebody about coming to our church but he said I'm dying I'm afraid where do I go they said go to Grace Community Church somebody in his homosexual world the gay pride parade has had as many as a million people in it such a huge thing anyway came he sat in the back in the reading of the psalm he was convicted by the Word of God he heard that God was a God of grace who would deliver him as Scott promised to deliver his people and he came to the front to meet me after the service and said I have to confess to you I need to be delivered told me this incredible story that morning embraced Christ as Savior and he said to me there was only one thing that irritated me about this service he said it was that after that Psalm was read and I wanted to come down and find out how I could be delivered you then got up and gave this long speech that's what he said his name was Robert Lagerstrom two weeks later I baptized him and he gave his testimony to the congregation and within a month he was with the Lord that is the power of the word of God one of the comment and the public reading yeah I think it's very interesting you know and the of the various documents the Westminster assembly produced one of the least known is its directory for the public worship of God and it places great emphasis on the consecutive reading of the scriptures and that you know speaking as a presbyterian that's part of our inheritance as Presbyterians that's almost disappeared from our liturgy and also and I you know I've wrestled personally with these commands in Scripture the blessings that are promised to those who read in a culture where there might have been one copy of a New Testament letter in the church and I think one is to take account of that but in the other hand I think our forefathers were right to understand that the reading of the word of God is part of the Ministry of the word of God and John's illustration and I suppose most of us in one form or another could provide illustrations of the same thing is really I think proof positive of how high in our priorities as part of our liturgies we ought to have the words that follow let us hear the word of God and term we don't pray enough about that I don't know if I've ever heard in a church prayer meeting anyone prays specifically for the reading of the word of God and I think that tells us a lot about where our priorities may be in the way instinctively we think about our worship services for the sake of the tape let me just say that we've been talking with our sea scroll or when Lutzer John MacArthur Sinclair Ferguson Ken Jones and Bob Godfrey Robert Godfrey both of them and our topic has been again on the Word of God Ken let's take that exhortation to heart why don't you close this session off and let's would you lead us in a time of praying that we would return to the reading of the God's Word in our churches in our lives our God and our Father we thank you once again for privilege of allowing us to assemble together for the recognition of the importance of your word we do realize that those who are present are here because you have given a hunger or a desire for the primacy of your word in the lives of your people we pray that all pastors and teachers that you have placed within your churches would regain that confidence that through your word you feed and you nurture your people we pray that you would give clarity of understanding and conviction of what we hear we pray that our sins would be revealed through a clear and consistent presentation of your law and our sins would also be forgiven through a clear and a constant presentation of your gospel thank you for these teachers in these men thank you for the wisdom that you have placed within this this particular ministry and we pray most of all that your word would have free course through all of the chosen instruments that you have chosen it's in the sweet precious and saving name of Christ that we pray amen

Channel: Ligonier Ministries

Views: 99,738

Rating: 4.8518519 out of 5

Keywords: Christian denominations, inherency of scripture, Bible translations, hermeneutics, interpret scripture, eschatology, end times, charismatic movement, worship, The Bible (Religious Text), orl02

Id: khYnOoKo3jw

Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2013