Good morning. Thanks for having me. Uh come out and be with you guys today at Mission Grove. Uh John asked a few months ago if I'd come out and speak and I'm just so excited to be here and uh to spend this Sunday with all of you. I love this part of the valley because I went to uh a bible college not too far from here and I went there forever ago because I'm old now. But um they, they finally connected the 51 and the 101 my freshman year. Do any of you remember that when that happened? Like I only used to go to Greenway and I couldn't get to in and out and back in between classes and there's God answers prayers. That's all I'm saying. And eventually it connected. So I always uh think of Desert Ridge as the in and out uh rush in between class plays. So I love this part of the valley. Love being here with you all today. Hey, I wanna start off with reading a verse uh from Matthew 24. Uh Matthew 24 verse 35. Jesus says this heaven and earth. Will pass away, but my words will not pass away, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. Is that true? Did Jesus really follow through with that promise? Or are these just empty words? How do we know that we can trust what this book says? Do you know that Mormons Muslims and atheists all claim that your New Testaments corrupted and that you have no clue what Paul originally wrote, what Matthew originally wrote, what Jesus said, you can't know it. There's actually this analogy that often gets used that it's like the telephone game. Have you guys ever played the telephone game when you were a kid? And you know, one kid comes up with uh something to say and then whispers it into the ear of the next kid and then the next kid's supposed to transfer that to the next and on and on and on. And it's a fun game because it gets screwed up along the way, right? It gets messed up. And by the time you end, somebody says something and it is nothing like what the original kid had said. The analogy is, well, that's what happened with your New Testament actually just got translated from Greek into Syria into Coptic, on and on and on and on. How can you even believe you're even close to knowing what was originally written? Muslims and Mormons both say that after the time of the apostles, your new Testament was intentionally corrupted by the church and that Muhammad had to come along and restore things, or Joseph Smith had to come along and restore things so that the real church can be on earth. The real religion can be here. How do we know that our New Testament is trustworthy and often, um, a response that I see happen is, is as Christians. Um, we just dig our heels in because we're stubborn people. Right? And we come up with what I call, um, bumper sticker theology. I hope none of you have this bumper sticker on your car. And if you do, I'm ok. Stepping on your toes. Have you ever seen this bumper sticker? The Bible says it, I believe it. That settles it. Have you ever seen that before? This settles nothing. Like, what does that even mean? That just means I believe it and therefore it's true. Really? Have you ever had a belief that didn't pan out like those girls you thought like you in junior high and they really didn't? Right. It's true. Just because you believe something doesn't make it true. You should be believing in what you know is true. That's the idea. You, your faith is only as good as the object you're placing your faith in. If Jesus is the way reality truly is, we should trust him and if he's not, you should find the way reality really is. We can't dig our heels in this and I've often thought about this. What if you saw like a Muslim bumper sticker that said this, the Koran says it. I believe that that settles it, right? You wouldn't accept that as good evidence or Mormon bumper sticker. This is the book of Mormon says it. I believe it that settles it. That settles nothing. Your belief settles nothing. The reasons and the evidence for why you have faith. Well, that's different and that's what we need to look at. That's what apologetics is about. How do we defend? Why we believe what we believe we need evidence. So, has God preserved his word? And uh because we don't have 10 hours to be here, we're not gonna talk about the Old Testament this morning. All right, we're only gonna talk about the New Testament. Has God preserved? The New Testament is what we have in this book. What was written 2000 years ago? How do we know? Well, we're gonna look at a couple of things today. The first thing that we're gonna look at is what's called textual transmission. And this is the process by which a text has been copied and re copied throughout the ages. This isn't just about The New Testament. This is about any ancient document, Homer's Iliad, the writings of Plato, all of it. How do we know that they've passed down through time and been transmitted accurately? The second thing we're gonna talk about is translation. Now, we're familiar with this right? This is rendering one language into another language. Often times when we're talking about the New Testament, people confuse these two, they like mix them together. We we wanna be careful with that. They're not the same thing. All right. So not, not mixing them is important for us, especially when we're trying to defend our faith with our atheists, Muslim and Mormon friends. So let's start with textual transmission. How do we know that it has been passed on to us accurately? Well, I am a super nerd and I love studying history and all historians have criteria for how we can know events happened in the past. I know sometimes we just, we go and we read, you know, in our textbooks at school. Well, this happened. Well, it must have, well, how do we know? Right. How do we know that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? How do we know what George Washington did? How do we know this stuff? Well, there's evidence, there's manuscripts, there's writings from the past that we can analyze and we can deduce what most probably happened when historians are looking at ancient documents. There's four criteria that they wanna look at the first is contemporary accounts. So if, if you wanna know, if an event happened in the past, you wanna get as close as you can to the time of that event and you want somebody writing about it at the time it happens, right? If I wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln. It might be really great, but I, I don't know much about him. Other than that, he's on the $5 bill and the penny. Right. II, I thought he was a really great people talk about how great he was and I'm like, he only got a $5 and a penny. Isn't that funny? Like you think, maybe $100? But we put Ben Franklin there anyway. If I wrote about Abraham Lincoln, I'm far removed from his time period. It would be much better if somebody who was like his friend or lived at the same time in the same culture, in the same place, wrote about him. That's a better account than me writing about him. So you want contemporary accounts and if you can have eyewitness accounts to stuff, that's the best. You also want multiple accounts. You don't just want one person talking about it. You want a whole ton of people talking about it. You want different angles of it. If you were trying to recount a car accident that happened out here on Pinnacle Peak and there was one guy on the southwest corner of the street and the guy on the northeast corner of the street and they both came together and they said, yeah, actually I saw this happen, this, this, this they're gonna have different perspectives. But when you look and analyze both of their stories, you can piece together what had happened. So you want more than one person talking about it, you want multiple people talking about it. You also want these to be independent sources. So not just one story retold 25 times, right? If I saw an event and I was the only person there and then I told my wife and she wrote an article about it and then her friend read the article and made a podcast about it. Well, that's still only one source. That's just me. Right. They're copying my stuff. You want more than that, you want independent sources. Uh It's really interesting because when you think about the the evidence for Mormonism or for Islam, it literally was, I Muhammad was all by myself in a cave. No other witnesses when the angel came to give me the Quran or I Joseph Smith was all by myself in a forest. No other witnesses around and you're just trusting that one source. Well, that's not what we have with the New Testament. We have multiple sources. You don't just want independent sources though. You would love if you had people who were friendly about the historical accounts and people who are hostile towards it, like people who are enemies and friendly to it, right? People on both sides of the equation because if they're agreeing that something happened, it probably did because these two types of people don't usually agree on anything. It would be like Suns fans and Lakers fans getting along, right. Crazy. And the Lakers fans, uh uh I just, I pray for their souls. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, the last thing that we want is we want consistency. We want these accounts saying the same thing we want because then we go, OK, this, this must have happened because everybody's agreeing from all these different angles, from all these different perspectives and all these different biases, they're all being consistent with one another. So let's look at how the New Testament shapes up when we analyze it according to how we analyze any type of historical document. All right. So check out this slide, this is really helpful and this slide changes all the time. It is, you have to update this because we're always finding new manuscripts, right? This is an ongoing science. So you look at um Homer, right? He wrote the Iliad. Any of you read that before? Had to read it for school. 23 people. OK. Good. It's really good. You guys should check it out. Uh Homer's Iliad, he wrote it in 800 BC. And the earliest manuscript copy that we can hold in our hands today is from 400 BC, which that's man, that's really old, right? But it's 400 years after the time he actually wrote it. So is that contemporary? Uh No, it's not really, it's not close. I mean, it's longer than the length of our country's existence, right? It's a long time, but we all trust that Homer wrote the Iliad, right? We don't, we don't doubt that it's good history. Ok. Now, in addition to that, how many ancient copies of the Iliad do we have, we have 1757 ish, depending on how you count. Um, now the oldest one again is from 400 BC and all the rest are newer than that, but we can look at them and analyze and see how they match up and deduce what he had said. This is how you piece together historical manuscripts, right? The same for play. Do the same for Caesar, the same for livy, all of them right now. I I put this up there because I want to show you how phenomenal the New Testament manuscript evidence is. All right. Look at this of The New Testament. We have them written between 50 100 ad and some people believe that they're written in the forties. But I'm trying to be as generous to the atheists as I can with this. All right, this is this is the liberal end of things. All right. So we're gonna say between 50 100 ad is when all 27 of the New Testament were written. Um The earliest manuscript we have of a New Testament book is from 130 ad again, I think it's probably 15 or 20 years earlier, but this is the most liberal. This is as late as it could be. It's called the John Ryland Papyri and it has uh some verses from the gospel of John on it. 40 years. That's way better than 400 years. That's way better than uh 1300 years. Did you see that with Plato and tetralogy? 1300 year time gap from when he wrote it to the manuscript of it, we can hold in our hand. It's a long time now. It doesn't mean it's not true. It just means there's a lot of room for error or for people to change stuff, right? A lot of room not so with the New Testament 40 years. And now when we look at the number of only Greek New Testament manuscripts, we have somewhere between 110,300 Greek New Testament manuscripts. So this is awesome for us, right? We're not even to talk about the translations that happened in the 1st 100 years of Christianity and the Syriac and Coptic. We have a whole ton of those too. We we don't have time to talk about all that. Just the Greek New Testament manuscripts, we have a ton of them and they're early on uh close to the times of when they were written. Now, it doesn't mean what they say are true, right? And this, this sermon is not about the validity of the truth of scripture. Now, I believe scripture is true, but this is about, has God preserved his word do we have what they wrote? That's the big question for today. Do we have what they wrote? Uh Bruce Metzger, who is the smartest Greek New Testament scholar of the last 150 years. Uh, he said this, on the contrary, the time between the composition of the books of the New Testament and the earliest extant copies is relatively brief. There's not a lot of time to change it in years wise. right? And then he says, uh uh instead of a lapse of a millennium or more as is the case of not a few classical authors, several papyrus manuscripts of portions of the New Testament are extant that were copied within a century or so after the composition of the original documents. This is a guy who studied this stuff. This is a guy who actually looks at all the differences in the manuscripts. This guy knows what he's saying. Uh a few years ago, I went to the British Library in London and they have their, this book, it's called Codex Sous. It's the entire Greek New Testament in a book. And it's from about 1700 years ago, which means it's 300 years earlier than when Muhammad was given Quran. And I'm looking at this book going, you're 300 years older than Muhammad, like that's old, right? And guess what it says what we have? It's amazing, right? Has there been corruption? Well, the nice thing about Christianity is we have evidence to investigate. God hasn't left us just to blindly trust. He's left us really good reasons to believe what he says. Uh We need to believe really good reasons. So not only do we have the Greek New Testament manuscripts, but look at this, we also have quotes from early church fathers. This is crazy. This is about uh from Jesus death and then 400 years later, that's where all these guys lived. All right, and look at how many times in their writings that we have, they quote the Bible. So they're quoting something that already exists because the Bible, the New Testament was written prior to them, you know, writing and preaching. And I want you to look at the grand total number on the, on the bottom right corner. See that 36,289 verses quoted by these uh 77 guys. Do you know how many verses there are in the entire New Testament? 7956 or 7959 depending on where you break them up. So think about that, we have 36,000 plus quotes and there's only seven let's just say 8000 verses in the New Testament. It means this, if we burned all of the Greek manuscripts that we have, we could piece together the entire New Testament just from quotes from the early church fathers. Do you know that evidence upon evidence upon evidence as to what this says as to what God wanted written down for us. It's amazing. Now, if that was all we had, that would be amazing. But we also have non-christian sources who lived within 100 and 50 years of Jesus life, who tell us things about the New Testament, who tell us things about the events surrounding Jesus and his death and burial and resurrection. So this is where we can see consistency and corroboration that are the New Testaments speaking truth. Well, if your enemy agrees with you, then you most likely are right? Because they don't agree on anything on anything. So if you look at guys like Josephus Thallus, Tacitus, Marar Sarra on all of these guys who lived within the 1st 100 years of Jesus life. Some were Roman, some were Jewish, whole bunch of different people across the spectrum, but none of them were believers in Jesus. When we analyze the things they wrote about Jesus and his followers. This is the things, these are the things that we can deduce. They say they say that Jesus lived during the time of Tiberius, Caesar. Well, that's crazy because Luke says that exact same thing that Jesus lived during Tiberius Caesar's time. Uh They say that he lived a virtuous life, all of the New Testaments about that, right? Joseph has specifically says that Jesus was a wonder worker, he did miracles, he did miracles. He had a brother named James uh he was acclaimed to be the messiah. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He was crucified on the eve of Jewish Passover darkness and an earthquake occurred when he died. This is from non Christians, non Christians. His disciples believed that he rose from the dead. His disciples were willing to die for their belief. Christianity spread rapidly as far as Rome and his disciples denied the Roman gods and worship Jesus as God man. That that's all the stuff that we read about too. This stuff probably happened if the enemies and the people friendly to Jesus are saying the same things occurred. So we can start to piece together a historical account of what actually happened. What does the evidence lead us to conclude? So we have a ton of evidence that the New Testament uh uh of the New Testament manuscripts. But again, I wanna tell you this, that doesn't mean that what it says is true. But our question for today is, do we know what it originally said? So how do we get from? OK. We've got all these manuscripts, we got all these quotes. Now, what do we do with it to figure out what it originally said? This is where the science comes into it. And super smart hyper nerds have been doing this for decades. It's called textual criticism, textual criticism. So they take all of the manuscripts and they analyze them scientifically. We do not have the original writings of Paul or of Matthew or of John or of any of the New Testament authors. We don't have the original, we call it the autograph, like the one they actually wrote, we don't have those, they're gone. So how do we know what they originally wrote? Well, what we do have is copies of copies of copies and we have tons of them more than any other ancient document like we've talked about. So what we do is we take all of these copies and we compare and contrast them and there's a, there's a amazing science to this. So to determine what the original probably said, they have rules, like the more difficult reading is probably true. So they're comparing two verses of John 316 and one has some like complicated stuff. They'll go, that's probably more true because typically if you're a Christian and you're, you're copying God's word, you wanna help people understand it better. So you simplify it, right? That's what pastors do. They simplify stuff, they say. So the difficult ones probably more reliable because the scribe would have a tendency to simplify, not to make it harder. They also have rules like the shorter reading is probably the most original because people would add to God's word to clarify, but they probably wouldn't take away from God's word because they believed it's God's word, right? And there's prohibitions about that in scripture. So there's all these rules and they analyze and they compare and contrast. And when we dig up new manuscripts and we find more of them, we, we throw them in and we compare and contrast and we look to figure out what's going on and I wanna give you an analogy because this will help you see like how, how they do it. So let's say we have the original autograph of Ephesians, OK, that Paul wrote and in this, it says Ephesians 28, right? For by grace, you have been saved through faith. Now, uh the Ephesians copy it and they take it to Laodicea and they take it some other churches around, right? And people are making hand copies of this book and in one of the copies we find it says for by Grace, you have been and then there's like a tear in the papyrus. All right, there's a hole and then we're missing a word for by grace. You haven't something through faith. Oh man. Now we're not, we're never gonna figure out what it said, right? What if we found another one that said for by race, you have been saved through faith, right? Oh No, that totally changes the meaning. Like how are we gonna know what's true? Let's say we find another one that says for by grace. Have you been saved through faith? Now, how do we figure out what the original said? Because here's the deal. We don't have the originals. But when we take the copies of the copies of the copies? Couldn't you analyze these three copies and figure out what the original said it be pretty simple to do, wouldn't it? Ok. What's the missing word? We have two other ones that say saved. So it's probably saved for you for by grace you have been saved. That's what's missing there. What about the other one for by race? You have been saved? Well, that's easy. The copyist just forgot a letter. Do you do that when you text? Have you ever? Right. Even with spell check, do you text and make mistakes? We all do that same thing happened when they were copying this stuff. They left out a letter. It's easy to see that it's supposed to be grace because we have these two others. What about the word order of? Have you been saved or you have been saved? Well, we can analyze and we don't just have three copies, right? Remember 5000 plus. So that's this is what they do. They analyze all of it to see the differences and the similarities and come to the conclusion of what was the original? Now, this is where the atheists love to like freak out Christians. They love this. And this is where because we analyze this and we have so many documents. We find a lot of differences, half a million to be exact. Now you hear this. Wait a second, you're telling me there's half a million variants differences in the New Testament documents. Yeah, that's right. And one prominent atheist scholar Bart Ehrman, he always says this. He says there are only 100 and 38,000 words in the New Testament and you have half a million differences. It's like four for every one word, right? I mean, that's not how it works out, but he's trying to freak you out. How can you possibly know what it said when you have all of these differences, more variants than actual words in The New Testament? Well, here's the thing and this is really important for us to remember the fact that we can recognize there's half a million variants means we know what's not. Does that make sense? You couldn't know that there are variants unless you know what it's supposed to be. You see how that sword cuts both ways? But they won't tell you that the reason we have so many variants is because we have more manuscripts than any other ancient document. Like we have so much information that that's why there's so many. The other thing is this the significance of these variants uh is, is, is hardly hardly significant at all. Most of them are spelling errors. Most of them are, are names spelled differently. They didn't have standardized ways to spell people's names. I mean, we don't even like John, he spells his name, Jon, but a lot of people spell it, John. Right. Well, which one's right. Well, he would say Jon. Right. Right. That's correct. But we don't have standardized way. They didn't either. So they spell people's names. So that counts as a variant word order, right? Did you know in Greek, you can say, I love you 16 different ways. You can say that phrase in 16 different variations. OK. So is that really changing the meaning of scripture? No, not at all. In fact, this is, this is the newest set on this. Out of all half million of the variants, we have only somewhere between 0.3% and 2.8% of them are meaningful at all meaningful at all. This is great for us. 97% of the half million don't mean anything they're easy to see. Oh, that's a misspelling, that's word order that it doesn't change what scripture says. And then we know what the right way is. By the way, Peter Gurry, he's at Phoenix Seminary and he wrote a great book and he said this about the meaningful variant. It is best to admit that in relatively rare cases, variants really do have some bearing on some doctrines and ethical practices of the Christian faith, but none of these doctrines or ethical practices is established from these disputed texts. What he's getting at is this even with these, let's say 3% of them, which there's not that many. But let's say 3% of the half million change in meaningful ways. The New Testament, even if we say, OK, those verses are changed. Let's get rid of them. We shouldn't do that. But I'm just saying we get rid of them. It doesn't change the doctrines because we don't build doctrines off of one verse. That makes sense. We have multiple verses. We have multiple places to talk about Christ deity. We have multiple places to talk about the resurrection of Jesus, multiple places that talk about Trinitarian concepts, right? So it's not like we lose anything even if we can't figure out which ones are which. But by the way, we can also figure these ones out when it comes down to it. The Greek New Testament we have today is 99% accurate to the original readings. And this isn't my opinion. This is scientifically verifiable. This is, you can't argue this, this isn't just I'm gonna just believe it against all evidence. No, this is what we find historically. And if you wanna throw this out, you have to throw out all history as we know it. You have to throw out all ancient manuscripts because The New Testament is the best attested out of everything. Everyone assumes that Plato wrote what he said, he wrote. Everyone assumes Homer wrote the Iliad. But if, if you believe those with less evidence, you, you also have to say we have what the New Testament originally said again, doesn't mean it's true. I believe it's true and there's reasons. But for this talk, we're establishing has God preserved what was originally written? And the answer to that is a resounding yes. A resounding. Yes. Now we've talked about transmission of the text, right? But there was that argument from atheist Mormons and uh and Muslims that they say, listen, it was all corrupted. After the time of the apostles, the Mormons will say many plain and precious portions were changed and Joseph Smith had to come and write the ship and the Muslims will say they were intentionally changed by the church and Muhammad had to come and write the ship. So how do we argue that? Well, one way I like to do it is this um in 70 ad there was this really huge event where Jerusalem got completely laid waste by the Roman Empire. They came down and they destroyed the temple. They threw all of the the stones that built the temple off of the temple mount. You can actually go to Jerusalem and still see those stones today. They're still lying there where the Romans had thrown them off the temple mount because Christianity is true and this all really happened. But what happened when that event occurred was Christians in Jerusalem left because they were being persecuted. We call the diaspora. Christians fled to different parts of the world. And when Christians fled to different parts of the world, you know what they took with them? New Testament documents, New Testament Scriptures. It's important to them, right? So what God did through this event. I think it's fantastic because New Testament manuscripts started going all over the world in 70 ad, this is before all of the apostles were dead. So if, if we wanna believe that our New Testament got corrupted after the time of the apostles, then what do we have to believe? Well, there's two things. Number one is we have to think that some mastermind was able to travel the entire known world and collect every single uh New Testament manuscript ever and change them all in exactly the same place so that it's undetectable to us today when we look at them. Well, that sounds like not evidence at all, right? And then we'd also have to believe that the Christians never mentioned that there was some guy going around radically changing their scripture. You'd really think somebody would have mentioned that that problem was occurring, right? We don't see anybody saying that we see people quoting it the way that we find it in the ancient manuscripts. That idea that it was changed is so absurd because we have documents prior to Islam, prior to Mormonism, you know, in the Quran, it says that the New Testament and the Old Testament were legitimate at the time of Muhammad. It says in the Quran that as Christians were supposed to go to the gospels, that Allah gave us. What this is implying is that at the time of Muhammad, the gospels haven't been corrupted yet, why would a lot tell us to go to them? Does that make sense? And we have New Testament documents from the six hundreds and prior, what not changed according to Islam, it can't be changed, right? God's word can't change. Even in the Quran, we know what the originals say and this argument that they were corrupted or somebody switched them. It's just, it's so laughable, so laughable, but we need to know how to defend our faith. Now, let's talk a little bit about translation. Like I said before, people conflate those two transmission and translation. We don't wanna do that. We know transmission. Now. Now let's move over to how do we translate the New Testament? Remember that uh telephone analogy that I started with, imagine if we did this, how terrible this would be. Paul writes Ephesians in Greek and then it gets translated to SAC. And then 50 years later, it gets translated to Latin. And then Martin Luther comes along and takes the Latin and translates it to German and then they translate it to French and then we finally get English, right. YCL or King James or whatever. Could you imagine how much would be lost through that type of a system? This is terrible. Well, we don't do that. No. And, and here's the thing, we've never done that because that's laughable. Everybody always knows that if you translate into five different languages, you're gonna lose a lot. Do you know how we translate the New Testament today, a the Greek uh text. It's called the Nestle on 28th edition. They do all the text criticism of all the thousands of Greek manuscripts. They deduce what the original says with a 99.99% accuracy and they come out with new editions of it because we keep discovering more manuscripts. And so we got to analyze those and add them to the mix, right? We take that superior uh Greek, New Testament and then we translate the Greek to English or we translate the Greek to Spanish or we translate the Greek to Mandarin because everybody knows if you go through eight languages, you're gonna lose a lot. It's gonna change things. This is the way we've always done it. When Jerome translated the, the Bible into Latin into the Latin Vol Gate, he knew Greek and he got the Greek manuscripts of his time and he translated from Greek to Latin. And then he moved to Bethlehem for a decade and he was taught Hebrew by rabbis so that he could translate The Old Testament into Latin because everybody's always known that if you translate into six different languages, it's ridiculous. So don't let people try to pull that on you. We've never done that. We do not do that. We go one translation over one translation over now. Um This is the kind of stuff at standard reason we love talking about. And here's the infographic. If you all our stuff online is free. We have online courses, we have articles, we have podcasts, we have videos, everything on there and we talk about why we can defend our faith. How we can know that Christianity is the way the world really is, not just for us, but for all people, this is true for all people. Jesus said he is the way and the truth and the life. But I want to leave you with a little inspiration of why and what did God intend the New Testament to be? This is important for us. And I'm gonna say something that might step on your toes. But hear me out in your Bibles, you do not have the words of Jesus. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking this guy is a heretic and I know I have them because they're in red man, right? They're the red letters of what Jesus said. But here's what I mean, what, what language did Jesus speak, do you know, spoke Aramaic? Spoke Aramaic? It was a, a Hebrew dialect and your Bibles in English. See, see, you see, you don't have the very words of Jesus except for in Mark a couple of times, he says the Aramaic phrases and then he translates them into Greek. But most of the New Testament, aside from a few phrases in Mark was written in Greek, but Jesus didn't speak Greek, right? Well, he might have been able to, but when he was talking with his disciples and he was talking to the weddings and he was not speaking Greek. So why did God inspire the New Testament authors to write it in Greek in the first place? This is why this book is for all people. It's not just for a privileged few. You know, the Quran, you're, you're not really reading Quran unless you read it in Arabic. Do you know that? So if, if you, if you can't speak Arabic or read Arabic, you can't read God's word. A translation of it is not good enough. They would say that is not what the New Testament is. That's not what it was ever supposed to be right off the bat. God inspired the New Testament authors to translate it. You see that he didn't allow us the opportunity to worship the very syllables. He said, he also told them to take it into all nations because this is a book for all peoples. It was always meant to be translated into other languages and he got that ball rolling right off the bat and this is what's so beautiful about it. The message of the Bible can be explained to all tribes, nations and tongues, right? Isn't that our commission? Isn't that what we're supposed to do? You can't do that if you have to teach everyone Aramaic. Does that make sense? God never intended this to be like the Koran. This is completely different this book is actually what you would find of a God who wants to reach all peoples, a book that can be translated and the message, the truth of what he spoke can be communicated to people in their native tongue. And I think that's just amazing. I think that is beautiful how God has preserved his word, how he's done it, using people who make mistakes. But in fact, the mistakes help us know what it said. Isn't that awesome? And he's, he's preserved it 2000 years down to us. This book is amazing and the God behind it uh has, has still been doing a miracle in the preservation of it. And we live in an age where literature is everywhere. Don't take it for granted, don't take it for granted. So many nameless people have gone through history, copying this so that you can have it today, read it, study it, know what it says, but know why it's trustworthy, know why we can know we have what was originally written. And then all right, let me pray for us. Lord God. I'm so thankful that we can know truth, Lord. And it's not some blind faith where we just trust against all facts. Lord, it's a, it's a well founded faith. It's a reasonable faith. Lord, I'm thankful that we can help others to understand truth. Lord, that you tell us to be your ambassadors, to be your representatives here on this earth. And Lord that we can go out and we can help break down fortresses and lofty things raised up against the knowledge of God and take thoughts captive. Lord thoughts in our culture about truth, thoughts in our culture, about what our identity is. Thoughts and culture about the afterlife. We can go out and we can help people see truth. Lord and I pray, I pray for everyone here in mission grove. Lord, that our hearts would be to help people not believe in lies, because lies destroy us, lies lead us down paths that, that harm. But truth sets us free Jesus. You are the way and the truth and the life, not just for us but for all people, for all times and all places help us take this message to our friends and family and neighbors. Lord and love them enough to share truth, but we love you. What's your name? We pray these things. Amen.