The Authorized 1611 King James Bible

This is the Pulpit Edition (in other words it’s massive in size) of the original printing of the KJV. It was amazing to look at especially since according to what I knew, there was no complete editions of the 1611 left, but apparently not. It’s probably hard to see in the picture I got (because the quality sucks; I used my iPhone) but the written English is very different to our English today.

Namely, the spelling isn’t standardized by this point in history so you see “fear” spelt as “feare” and “prophesy” spelt like “prophesse”. Also noticeable is it appears to use some letters that don’t exist in current English. For example the letter “s” in “goodness” and the first “s” in “Psalms” uses a letter that looks life it’s an “f” but without the horizontal line. Also those words are spelt differently as well when compared to modern English.

What I found cool as well was the fact that what I presumed to be more of a modern invention was the pericopes at the top of the page. These basically give a summary of the content on the page. Also, on the inner and outer columns you will notice small writing, this writing is in fact translators notes. It’s amazing because they read exactly like modern translators notes. Lastly, and this is purely artistically speaking the styling of the first letter of every chapter looks really well done. I’ve always liked the look of these stylized letters.

The Saxon Gospels

The Saxon Gospels are written in Saxon (obviously :P) which is basically an early form of English. The text is probably too small to read (feel free to shoot me an email if you want the bigger pictures) but this is unreadable to the modern English speaker. I have as much luck reading French or German as I do reading this. Admittedly, I can read some of it but it’s mostly incomprehensible to me. This is made even more difficult by using characters that we no longer use in English today.

It’s really amazing how much English has changed in the last 1000 years. At least early English translations like the Tyndale, Geneva and the KJV are still readable to some degree but this is beyond a joke. I think that the few hundred years that passed from this form of English to that of the Reformers would have been incomprehensible to them as it is to us. I think this shows the importance of updating our translations continually otherwise what was the common translation all could read becomes the translation only the elite read (i.e. Latin Vulgate).

Anyways, moving from that rant I also wanted to point out that there is an English translation of the text in the outer columns if I’m not mistaken :)

The Geneva Bible

This Bible is not only awesome because it’s the Bible of the Puritans and of the early English settlers in North America but this particular Bible that is on display is supposedly the former Bible of a Mr. William Shakespeare. The influence of the Geneva Bible is seen in some of his plays and there is no doubt that this was the translations he used during his prolific years. There is debate as to whether or not this is a genuine copy of his Bible but there are a few reasons that would push one to consider it genuine.

Firstly, there is the initials “W.S” inscribed on the front cover and a (illegible) signature in the front pages. The Bible is littered with his initials alongside many verses as well as notes and commentary written alongside some that bear likeness to his handwriting, if it is a forgery it is a cleverly done one. Lastly, the Bible was given to the Bible society through an individual who got if off one of Shakespeare’s ancestors (via his sister). With this all in mind it seems quite likely to be his Bible. Nevertheless it’s still breathtaking to me to see something so old so well preserved, regardless of whether or not it was truly Shakespeare’s Bible.

The Polygot Bible

I’ve saved my favorite one until last. The Polygot Bible is a Bible that consists of numerous translations of scripture, including the original languages. It came in several volumes and the first volume is here for display. The languages contained in this edition are: Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Persian, Latin and Samaritan. All of the languages are accompanied with a Latin translation of the text. I found the Hebrew, Syriac, Latin and Persian fairly easy to read. The Greek and Latin was too small for me to really read it properly and the Samaritan was in between those extremes.

Though I have a limited grasp of these languages it nevertheless puts me in awe looking at this historic text and see the amount of diligent work put into writing it. It was all done by hand and you can see the care put into trying to make it as readable as possible. Funnily enough, the curator told me that if you look further into the book you can see the author getting tired and therefore a bit more sloppy with his margins :)

Conclusions

Today is the last day there, and after this I’m on my way to check them out again. I’d encourage you to check them out if you get a chance (they’ll be going  back to Canberra I believe after this) and stand in awe of our Christian history. Feel free to ask any questions  you may have and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. Also, feel free to email and request the photos (I’ll be taking hopefully better ones today). God bless and take care until next week,

In no particular order:

Online Texts

http://www.ccel.org/

http://www.monergism.com/

Online Audio

http://www.sermonaudio.com

http://www.faithcomesbyhearing.com/

Ministries

http://www.desiringgod.org/

http://www.gty.org/

Blogs

http://triablogue.blogspot.com

http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/

http://www.9marks.org/blog/

http://teampyro.blogspot.com

Radomly

This made me chuckle, so I decided to throw it in.

You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.

The Jewish people were putting themselves first and God last. How little has changed with the human nature. Their pursuits (and so often ours today) were in vanity as God was not in it. How vain is it to seek fulfillment in anything outside of God? Just as they were seeking to possess fine housing as a priority over God so do we seek possessions before the Lord our God. He is the giver of the gifts we have in our possession and He is also the one whom empowers us to enjoy these gifts or not (Ecclesiastes 5:18; 6:2). In the society we live in the lines get blurred (or rather we blur them intentionally) as to whether our priority of possessions has usurped the priority of a right relationship with our God. Sometimes God has to take away what we are holding onto for us to realize what’s going on with us. The modern day “prophet” A.W. Tozer recognized this cancer on society:

There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets `things’ with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns `my’ and `mine’ look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution. – Chapter 2, The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer

Let’s examine ourselves and give ourselves a reality check. Are we holding onto anything? Is there anything that means more to us than Jesus Christ? What broken cisterns are we trying to quench our thirst with? Let us kick these aside as we press towards the mark. Let us run into the arms of Jesus; the one who is the living water; the one who truly quenches our thirst and the one who’s arms are outstretched waiting for us. Let’s not wait for discipline to set us right (Revelation 3:19). Instead let’s run to Him now and leave aside our worldly possessions that offer temporal comfort to the one who gives eternal joy. Until next week, (By then I’ll hopefully continue my Hermeneutics series! :))

Get yourself the best study software around. You may be scared by the price but I’m telling you it’s worth it. Not only do you get hundreds (or in my case thousands) of books it also simplifies the task for you. Also, it has payment plans. When I got the Scholar’s package a couple years ago I paid it over several months and have done the same for pretty much every major upgrade I’ve done. Anyways, off my soapbox I go.

What I want to tell everyone in this post today is about a new video series Logos has released called “Learn to Use Biblical Greek and Hebrew with Logos Bible Software“. Now I am wholeheartedly recommending it but I want to up front tell you what the video series isn’t before I tell you what it is.

This video series doesn’t teach you the original languages with the purpose of you attaining fluency, in other words when you have mastered the series you will not be able to grab your NA27 or you BHS and read it. As a result, you do not spend the countless hours learning vocabulary, transliterating and translating passages into English. You will not have anything more than a minor grasp of the vocabulary if any by the time you are done. Also, on top of this, your learning is tied in with the Logos software, as in applying a lot of the knowledge to other software isn’t easily transferable.

Now, you may be thinking this is one hectic investment for something that sounds basically useless. I would agree if that was all that was said but there is more to it. The key to the purpose is in the title of the product. When you purchase this video series it teaches you how to use the original languages in the Logos software profitably. In other words it tells you how to use the Logos software efficiently to mine the important information of the original languages and how to apply it to your personal studies, your teaching and of course your preaching. A bold claim given by these guys is by the time you are done you will have the same practical grasp of the language as a 3rd year seminary student.

The focus is on making your knowledge useful and practical. Most people when they leave Bible college or seminary forget a lot if not most of  what they learned about the original languages and as a result use them very little in their personal studies, even when they have software like Logos that does most of the work for them. In the people I know whom have attended Bible college or seminary, several (i.e. most)  have forgotten most of what they learned because they simply don’t use it.  As written on the Logos site “We are aware of the research that suggests less than 20% of pastors who have had biblical language training actually use that training on a regular basis.” The purpose here is to teach you something that you’ll remember because you will use it all the time.

I highly recommend Logos, and I recommend these videos. Luckily, I got them on pre-publication and got it for about a 1/3 of the price but nevertheless it’s worth the investment! The main reason I got this was in preparation of my original language studies beginning next year. With this software I will have a working knowledge of the languages by the time I start going to the classes and learning the vocabulary. In my case, my aim is fluency, but for most people it’s more about the payoff than about the fluency and this is the market these videos are geared towards.

Until next week,

Ways to Interpret

Through pretty much any artistic medium you have essentially 2 ways to interpret the message conveyed. The medium could be anything like music, art, poems or even books. On the one hand you can look at a piece of art and say “What this means to me is this” or “What this means to me is that” and the same can be said of music lyrics “Hey, you know when he says that line? For me I imagine he actually is talking about this”. People get careers in looking at something and giving their spin on the situation and telling people what they think this or that is really about.

On the other hand people can read the lyrics of a song and say “You know this speaks so much more to me when I found out what he was going through when he wrote this” or they can look at art and say “I was reading his biography the other day and he mentions why he used these unnatural shade of colors; he wanted to convey this”. When you and I receive a bill in the mail or see a sign on the road we all seek to find out what message was the person trying to convey rather than inputing what I think it means. We want the intended meaning because if we get it wrong it could have consequences.

Ways to Read

The same processes exist in the field of Hermeneutics. They are called “Reader Response” and “Authorial Intent”. When we read scripture we come to it with one of these 2 methods. We can either look at the scripture and say “Well, what this passage means go me is..” or we can say “Looking at the context, and the way he uses this word elsewhere we can say that Paul meant this when he said..”

When the authors of Scripture (both man and God) penned their words they had an intended meaning behind it. It had a purpose. It is our job today to bridge the gap from their time to now and find out exactly what they were trying to say. It’s when we find out their message it’s then that we can derive a principle to apply it to our life.

We all can sit around in a Bible study asking the question “What does this passage mean to you?” and we we may very well get some wonderful testimonies and wonderful scriptural truths about God but if the meaning we’re giving isn’t found in the text, then despite the harshness of this I say: Who cares? Our authority is found in scripture alone and we very well may be teaching truth but if it ain’t found in the passage we’re in, move on.

Rather when we look at a passage we should ask “What message did the author intend to give in this passage?” When we begin asking this question of the text we begin to learn the messages left to us in scripture and can begin applying them to our lives.

Quick Tips

Before we leave I would like to offer *some* quick tips to help your reading of the Scriptures.

• Use a translation you understand. Don’t use one simply because everyone else is or because of the fact it’s the most popular one out there on the market. I’ve settled on the ESV after going through a couple but don’t take my word; do a little research and find the right one for you. Ultimately, you may stick with the translation you have already. In the end, the last thing you need to do is to go to a dictionary for every other word to help you understand what’s going on. You might as well learn the Greek and Hebrew*
• Stick to one translation. Consistency is key. Don’t jump around all the time, you will find it hard to get familiar with the text. If you stick to one even if it isn’t the best of translations over time you will develop familiarity and grasp the text better.
• Use  a well designed Bible. Most Bibles are 2 columned and are paragraphed according to verses. This is one of the biggest hindrances to actually understanding your Bible. No where else do you see books organized in such a format. Get a Bible that is single margin and broken into paragraphs, it will immensely improve your comprehension of the text. If you can’t find a single margin, get a double margin and if you can’t find that then as a last resort get one with paragraph markings but trust me you can get single margin Bibles in pretty much any translation, including the KJV. Though the paragraph markings are fallible, so are the chapter and verse markings but unlike those they will generally improve, rather than hinder understanding. This will be one of the best investments you will ever make.
• Use whatever medium works best for you. Given your circumstances your best time for reading might be on the train or bus to work, reading a book then might be a tad hard. Try reading on your phone, iPad, laptop or even your iPod. I found when I was traveling my phone worked best. Some people are more receptive to sound rather than visual input. Do not be afraid to try something out of the ordinary if you find it works better for you.
• Read at the most suitable time for you. I generally read best in the evening but I can also do the morning if I give myself enough time to wake up. If I try straight awake I will either fall asleep or not absorb anything. There is no point reading when you cannot grasp what your eyes are gazing at. Find the best time for you. Despite popular opinion it isn’t sin to read at another time besides 5am when the Sun is still down.

Until next week,

*I’m not bagging out any translation in particular but some translations like the KJV or the NASB can be hard to read. On the other hand some translations can be too loose and you get little to nothing of real meaning. Such translations like this I would stick away from include The Message and the New Living Translation. This topic deserves a post on its own so when looking for the right translation for you get advice and do some research before making a decision.

It probably comes as no surprise but the Bible literacy among the unchurched has fallen drastically over the years. In the time of the big name evangelists like Graham, Sunday and Moody everyone knew the Bible but now only those who grow up in the church know it to any degree. I can testify in my own experience that most of my knowledge of the Bible came from the episodes of the Simpsons. I knew of Noah, Moses and Adam and Eve. I knew of Jesus as the “Son of God” but not knowing He was God. I could not name a book of the Bible and all I essentially knew of its contents was their was a “Old” and “New” Testament.

Unfortunately, Christians today are not much better today. Statistics are readily available online to see that the vast majority of church going Christians do not read their Bible and therefore do not know it. This is a sad state of affairs and I think a lot of it has to do with the Bible not being seen as relevant. People read the Bible and do not see how they may make practical use of their reading and they do not understand a lot of what they read. This I think also ties in with the lack of grammar knowledge amongst people today as well but that’s another rant.

That is the reason I wish to do this series, I wish for us in this overview to look at at some of the principles behind Hermeneutics that we all can apply so we can dig into the word of God and let it grasp unto us and change us! This post has just been a summary and an introduction to the series but I hope I have whet your appetite. Until next week,

This post is the fourth of a 4 part series.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4

My first three posts in this series as one could tell all focused on the truth of the gospel; from the sinfulness of man to his need of redemption to Jesus Christ who redeems man through His blood. The reason I spent this time going through the gospel in these posts is because frighteningly most Christians don’t know the gospel or how to articulate it. If you have read Jerry Bridges book “The discipline of Grace” you would have probably been as shocked as I when he mentions that at a certain evangelical conference a questionnaire was given to define the gospel and only one person got it close to right!

The fact is you can’t preach what you don’t know. Unless you have a firm understanding of the gospel yourself you will be hesitant to share that understanding with others. That is the problem with a lot of evangelism courses out today. I see churches teaching methods to their congregation when what they really need to learn is the gospel message itself! (Another problem I would argue is the belief in decisional regeneration but I digress) Methodology changes from culture to culture and from one generation to another but the gospel truth is timeless.

We need to know what the gospel is to share it. We need to know it like we know are names and addresses. Without the knowledge of the gospel itself we will do evangelism course after course in vain and people still won’t go out and share the hope that lies within them!

Even more important is the fact that since we don’t know the gospel we won’t live the gospel. We will  fall into one of 2 extremes. We will either firstly be so discouraged by our own sinfulness we will be useless for service. We will live in sin and see no hope we may even live in constant fear of our condition not knowing if we are in the faith or not. Otherwise if it is not discouragement due to our sinfulness we will fall into a high view of ourselves and a low view of sin. In other words we will take sin lightly thinking we are essentially good people slipping up. Both conclusions are false and are not pleasing to our God.

The gospel is a constant reminder of our own depravity and the forgiveness we have in Christ. It keeps the scales balanced and when we live our life in light of the gospel we will live a life in victory. Without a gospel centered life we cannot live our Christian lives in victory, the gospel is the key to live victoriously. We may fail a thousand times, we may break promises to ourselves and we may find ourselves yet again drinking from those broken cisterns but if we turn back to God, confess our sins, remember the price paid and the forgiveness guaranteed; we will a life of victory in our Savior Jesus Christ.

“The gospel was a message of some complexity, needing to be learned before it could be lived by and understood before it could be applied. It needed, therefore, to be taught”

J.I. Packer “Evangelism & the Sovereignty of God”

This post is the third of a 4 part series.

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

So far we have seen the depravity of man, his inability to save himself and his need of Jesus Christ to save him from his damnation. This week we’ll briefly look at the cost paid to secure our salvation; that is the death of Christ on the cross. This is something that is quite often overlooked.

This week I don’t want to “beat a dead horse” so to speak but I do want us to reflect on the cost paid by Jesus Christ to bear the penalty for our sins. When Jesus went up on that cross He knew full well what sins we have done and will do but that did not deter Him from dying on the cross for us. He bared the shame and He took the excruciating pain for us. We all are probably familiar with what the cross entailed so I will not labor on that point but I would like us to focus on the cost of our sin. Sin always has a cost.

We may be familiar with the concept of sin finding us out and we may very well abstain from certain sins due to the fear of getting caught but we should realize that their is not just earthly consequences to our sin there are also eternal consequences. If we are without Christ we will bear the punishment for our sins in hell. As we have already discussed even what we may consider the lighter sins, the so called white-lies and so forth demand the death penalty every time.

If we know Christ then we face Him with what we have done with our life. How much should we fear to face Him when we have wasted our lives away on the inconsequential. Eating, drinking and being merry all the while we have our back turned to Him and living as if He were not present with us watching! Following Jesus Christ isn’t just attending church on Sunday’s and maybe during the midweek. It isn’t that at all. It’s a personal relationship with our Lord and through love and reverence to Him we obey Him and follow His will. I am fearful of how much of the precious time God’s given to me I have squandered. How much more fearful if we been wasting so much more of our time in sin.

Lastly and more importantly we should once again focus on the cost paid by Christ when we sin. That lie, that lustful glance, that bitter attitude; it’s all paid for by Jesus Christ. This isn’t a license to sin but a sober reminder. It should make us all the more consider what Jesus has done and bow ourselves before Him in worship and adoration.

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

There is a lot of different ways man can put himself in a situation where he can feel there is no hope, no way of breaking free. Sometimes it’s financial debt, he may have spent and spent and spent money on all the latest gadgets and all the latest fads but his credit card bill is looming over him. He sits defeated in a home he does not own, surrounded by possessions he does not own and a slave to the credit card that promised him of great and glorious things. Time is running out and the party is coming to a close but there is nothing he can do within himself to free himself from his immense debt, a debt that will take a lifetime to pay. There is no amount of hard work that will take care of the problem.

Another scenario is that of a drowning man. He had no problem getting himself into the mess but his salvation does not rest in himself. He can by no means pluck himself out of the water than he can turn that said water into wine.  He is in desperate need and the answer lies in the external. Someone else needs to help him and just like a drowning man needs another to pull him out of the depths of the sea so does the one in debt needs someone to bail him out in his hour of need. I hope we are beginning to see an important spiritual truth in instances like these.

As we saw in the week before last week’s post, man is in a serious predicament. Just like in these real world situations the answer lies outside the one in trouble so to are we in need of someone to bail us out of our trouble. As we saw last week man is a sinner who is completely depraved. He is stained by sin and he must bear the price of sin: Death in hell. There is nothing we can do to pay its cost. We can do no good, we can do no redemptive work on our own behalf and because of that we are consigned to our fate to bear the punishment for our wrongdoings.

Yet, just as we mentioned last week that God is holy, just and righteous we musn’t forget that He is also loving, compassionate and caring. God in His redemptive plan provided us the solution to our sin problem. Seeing that we cannot save ourselves and knowing that our sin needed to be righteously punished sent Jesus Christ His Son to bear the iniquity of us all. He acted as our substitute to pay for our sin and allowed God to not only punish sin but offer forgiveness of sin through Him who saves us from our sin.

In Romans 5:1 and 8:1 we have amazing truth. When we are in Christ we have moved from death to life and from condemnation to standing justified. As we have seen here so far man has racked up a debt he cannot pay and he suffers eternal consequences, he stands condemned before God. We can look at these verses and think “Great!” but the next though on our mind is “How do I move from condemnation? What does it mean to be in Christ?” Well in light of what we looked at, and if we understand our position before God we can claim this truth quite easily. We just need to look at 1 John 1:9

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Next week we’ll continue on with a more focused look at the death of Christ.

I’m afraid this week’s scheduled follow up post will have to be postponed until next week.

Up until recently I was co-teaching the men’s Sunday school at church. For our term we went through the book of Philippians and it was indeed a time of stretching in both the preparation of lessons and the application of the knowledge acquired.

It’s funny how God sometimes brings about in your life a chance to put the theory into practice.

One of the most powerful passages I’ve found in the book of Philippians is the hymn found in chapter 2:6-11. In this hymn the Apostle Paul presses on with his instruction to the Philippians in regards to humility with a real life example: Jesus Christ.

Christ’s condescendence into human flesh and His complete submission and obedience to the point of death on the cross is something all Christians should view to emulate. Of course none of us are God who manifested Himself in the flesh and neither are do we face death in obedience to God (at least most of us won’t) but some practical applications are to be found.

My focus in this post is not so much on displaying humility but acting in obedience to God no matter what the cost. Jesus Christ obeyed God despite the fact He knew it will lead Him to the cross, to a very painful death.

Often times we also know the cost beforehand of following Christ and we begin to count the cost. “Obedience or disobedience” we think. “Which one works out the most in my favor?” This is not how we should think! We should be willing to die for our Lord yet we are so hard hearted that merely loosing favor in man’s eyes causes our knees to shake. How dare we!

I exhort you all to look at Christ’s example and see it practically applied. For those of us in Australia what is there to lose in obedience to Him? Our friends? Our jobs or even our family? The cost is nothing compared to what Christ paid!

Now, you may be thinking that such a thing is hard to do. You would be right. In just the last year or so I’ve had 2 such “ultimatums”. In both occasions I’ve had to gulp hard, pray harder and take the bull by the horns. By outward appearance, I won the first time and with this recent second one…I’ve lost. Yet in both examples the truths of Philippians 4:13 ring true. Christ has given me the strength to obey Him and He will do the same to you when you’ve got those hard decisions to make as well.

I pray you make the right decision if and more likely when the time comes.