Saturday, July 5, 2008
Pastor Brian Cook

Psalms 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.”

One of the greatest objections that atheists and other skeptics have to the Bible is the fact that none of the original manuscripts by any writer of Scripture have survived until this day. It is true that we do not have in our possession the original writings of any Old Testament writer or any New Testament writer, but God never promised to preserve the original documents themselves, but rather He promised to preserve His “words”. How did He accomplish this? God preserved His words by allowing the Scripture to be diligently and accurately copied and re-copied by faithful scribes until we now have over 5,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts in existence today dating back as far back as 2000 years ago!

Five thousand copies of any ancient text is extremely impressive by anybody’s standards, but when we take into account other types of manuscripts, such as lectionaries and personal letters, the number of ancient manuscripts in existence today is about 24,000! These manuscripts range in size from small fragments that have only 2-3 verses to entire Bibles. They date from the 1st century to the 16th century (hand-written manuscripts ended with the invention of the printing press).

Right now the skeptic might think that I am proving his presupposition that it was because of the copying and re-copying of the Scripture that the Bible is unreliable, but I believe that the Bible itself has something to say about the use of copies and how God preserved His Word(s) by their use.

Jeremiah 36:1-2 says “And it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, that this word came unto Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee against Israel, and against Judah, and against all the nations, from the day I spake unto thee, from the days of Josiah, even unto this day.” This is God’s command to the Old Testament Prophet Jeremiah to write down all the words that God had spoken to him. Jeremiah did so and God’s Word was delivered to the king.

Jeremiah 36:21-23 “So the king sent Jehudi to fetch the roll: and he took it out of Elishama the scribe’s chamber. And Jehudi read it in the ears of the king, and in the ears of all the princes which stood beside the king. Now the king sat in the winterhouse in the ninth month: and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. And it came to pass, that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth.”

Unfortunately, the king chose not to receive the Word of God, but instead chose to destroy it. That is sad indeed since kings were commanded in the law of God to copy and keep His Word for their use.

Deuteronomy 17:18-19 says of the king “And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites: And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them”.

Not only did the king not make copies of God’s Word to be kept, but he burned the original manuscript! What was God’s response to the destruction of the original?  Jeremiah 36:27-28 says “Then the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, after that the king had burned the roll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned.”

What was God’s response? He told Jeremiah to make a copy of the original Scripture that he had written. Jeremiah 36:32: “Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words.”

It is clear that God did not need any original document of Scripture to survive in order for His Word to be preserved through careful copying. The old argument that the copiers of Scripture were not careful enough was once and for all dispelled by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. Up until this discovery the oldest copy of the Book of Isaiah was from around 900 AD, but this discovery yielded a complete copy of Isaiah (along with other books of the Old Testament) that was 1000 years older! At the time, many Bible skeptics were anxious to see the discrepancies between the copies that they knew had to be there. But, what was found instead was that, when compared, the two copies of Isaiah were virtually identical!

In order to make the point that God did not need to preserve an original writing of Scripture to preserve His words, God Himself ordered Jeremiah to destroy even the copy Jeremiah had made of his original manuscript.  Jeremiah 51:63 says “And it shall be when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates”.

Why did God have Jeremiah destroy the copy of His Word? First, He wanted to make an illustration of it regarding the destruction of Babylon, but God knew also that His words would not be destroyed completely because of other copies. How do we know that there were other copies made? Because we have them today and they are found in our own Bibles in the Book of Jeremiah.

God was never nervous about the destruction of the original Scriptures. He had always planned to preserve His Word and he did so by an ingenious plan to have His Word copied, re-copied, translated into other languages and spread all over the world until His words covered the entire globe. Psalms 147:15 says “He sendeth forth his commandment upon earth: his word runneth very swiftly.”

What makes this plan so ingenious? How could anyone make a deliberate change to His Word without it being immediately detected and determined to be fraudulent by a simple comparison of the thousands of copied texts? They could not. God did not play “telephone” with His Word He had it accurately recorded and we can have complete trust in the reliability of the Bible that we have today because God Himself has promised to preserve it forever!