Jack: Let me ask you this question.
Some people say that believing that the
King James Bible is the Bible, isn't a scholarly position.
What do you think?
David: It's really easy to put people down
by saying they're stupid.
You know, Jesus talked about that, and said you don't ever call
somebody "Raca," which means "empty head."
Don't ever do that, of anybody, whether they like the King James,
or not.
But as far as my own personal case,
I have to admit: I did it, too.
I did what my professors did with me.
I did the same thing with other people.
And I used to say, after I finished Bible college
at Pacific Christian College and took linguistics with the
Summer Institute of Linguistics and went to Fuller Seminary,
I used to say in my own church, in my own sermons,
that the only thing worse than the King James Bible
was the Living Bible.
So I was guilty of the same thing.
I thought King James Only people were country bumpkins,
who said, "If it was good enough
for the Apostle Paul, then it's good enough for me!"
Jack: You mean they had rocks in their head?
Rock-a?
David and Jack: Oooooo.
David: I'm not saying that.
But what I'm saying is, I went and got my education.
I was a top Greek student.
You guys know all that stuff.
And I went to seminary.
And I took my linguistics training.
And after that, I was still anti-King James.
It wasn't until years later, after I was married,
after I had kids, that I had to deal with
some really important issues.
And one of those issues was, if God preserved His words or not.
That doesn't have to do with whether you are scholarly or not.
It has to do with whether you are a Christian or not.
It has to do with whether you believe the scriptures or not.
We're saved by grace through faith.
That means we have to trust things
we don't always understand, or even before
we understand them.
Because sometimes we do end up
finding the answers.
And we thank God for those things.
I've spent years researching.
I've got books on papyri, you know, like this one right here.
I can read these books until I turn green.
I can go through my textual commentaries
and all the books I have up here, and
still not have those answers.
There are some simple, basic questions.
It's not a matter of how much schooling you had.
It's whether or not you're paying attention
to what God said.
God said, "Heaven and earth
shall pass away, but my words
shall not pass away."
What part of that did God not mean?
Jack: Now sometimes they say, "Well,
we still have His words today.
They're just scattered amongst all the
various manuscripts."
David: Ho ho ho ho!
Now did you catch that?
You see, it's like in seminary, where my professor,
David Allan Hubbard, who was the president
at the time, said, "Well, it's only God's word,
not God's words."
Then it's like, "You're ignoring
every single text in the entire world.
It says, "My words shall not pass away.'"
So you have to come to a point, no matter how
"intellectual" you are, no matter how
much training you have, of believing that either
God told the truth, and His words, plural,
are preserved...
And come on.
Any normal person listening to Jesus
would not think, "Oh yes.
One word would be over there, and one word would be over there..."
No!
They know what He meant.
He meant in one body where you can read them.
Otherwise, it's like saying, "Here.
Would you like to have a dictionary?
It's slightly defective.
All the pages are out of order.
But they're all there!
Jack: And that assumes they are all there.
In this case, they're saying that
"You can have the dictionary.
But... the pages are scattered.
And we're looking for them.
And some day we're gonna find them
and put together the original dictionary."
Who would ever want a dictionary like that?
And yet that's exactly what they say about
the word of God.
Does that make any sense?
David: Yeah, and who wants to believe
in a God like that?
Does the God of the Bible reveal Himself as the
God who scatters?
Or the God who brings together?
He said what I whisper in your ears,
you tell on the housetops.
If you have no concept of confidence
of what God said, how can you
yell it from the housetops?
You don't even know what to say.
Jack: Boy, isn't that the truth?
It's sad, the situation.
You know actually what I think it is?
It's a worldview.
Some people feel like ... they've been taught
that God did not preserve His words in a book
that's easily accessible to His own children.
Now that throws me off right away.
It seems to me that the Lord loves His children.
That's what I read.
And that He cares about us enough
that He would provide His words in a book
that we can read and believe.
He wants us to believe Him.
You know, He says
He magnifies His words even above His name,
His word above His name?
Well, if that's the case, doesn't it make sense
that He would gather all His words,
after the invention of printing, and put them
in a form and a shape, so that anybody
could read them and understand them,
and learn more about Him?
And then, once you learn, you are able to teach others,
make disciples, plant churches.
Isn't that what we're supposed to do?
David: And I've gotta tell you, you just hit something
that just struck me.
When I came to the conviction that God had
1) preserved His words, and that 2) He had
preserved them in English, and 3) that those
English preserved words were the King James Bible,
and all the evidence I had read for years
added up to that fact, do you know
the first thing I did?
You can ask my wife, I went out and spent $400.00.
I bought brand-new Bibles, King James Bibles,
not New Testaments, not scattered pieces of paper,
I went and got brand-new King James Bibles
for every member of my family.
Because I was convicted.
Because I wanted my kids to have the what?
The whole truth.
Would our heavenly Father do any less than that for us?
Jack: He wouldn't.