New Links & Blogs

I just added two new links and two new blogs to my link & blog rolls...

Advent of Messiah is the blog of David M. Cook, whose thoughts I first encountered on the Rosh Pina Project site. His blog's "About" page opens with the following:

This blog is about the arrival of the promised Messiah.  These posts are by David M. Cook the author of the book Advent of Messiah, the astonishing account of the arrival of the promised Messiah and the early years of His life on earth.  This book brings in history from the Jewish nation, the Roman Empire and the Gospel accounts of Saint Matthew and Luke to provide a vital and full spectrum of the advent of the Christ Child.

[NOTE 03/04/12: The links to both Advent of Messiah and Rosh Pina Project have been removed]

Grace and Truth Ministries is Jim Brown's website. Jim is a very unorthodox preacher, as I said on another site:

Jim’s teaching style is a bit screechy and aggressive at times—an unorthodox mix of edgy brilliance and Southern-fried iconoclasm—but if you can stand the heat, you’ll come to love the kitchen. A major proponent of “define, define, define”, Jim is a no-nonsense, serious-as-cancer Expositor of the Word of God.

Those words were from the new link My Bible Study Course, How To Study with the Greek NT. I ran the course over 10 Sundays at Paihia Baptist Church in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Each lesson covered a general principle for studying the Bible. All the Lesson notes are available there and I have no problem emailing any documents or handouts to anyone that wants them. I'm also more than happy to explain or clarify any of the teachings there.

PBC Greek Class was a first year Koine Greek course that I ran at Paihia Baptist Church. There were 20 lessons on that course which covered 32 weeks! As with the course above, the Lesson Notes are available on the site and I'd be delighted to send any of the other documents to whomever wants them. 


T'sollfernow,
μαρτυς

Back to Hebrew

Took a 6 month hiatus from studying Hebrew--well, beginning to study Hebrew; hadn't really got that far--but now I'm back at it and going very well. Things are a bit more complicated this time around though. I feel certian the Lord wants me to learn modern, conversational Hebrew as well as OT Hebrew. So, needless to say, I am very busy. I'd love to have more time to do nothing but study, but it's just not gonna happen. Still have to earn a crust and run my Sunday Bible Study class--at least till my wife and I jet off to Alaska in two month's time (a long story, but basically she'll be teaching for a year and I'll get to hang around and watch the Northern Lights).

A quick Praise Report re:Hebrew: My prayers before going to sleep last Monday included a request/acknowledgement that the Hebrew Lexicon I'm now sorely in need of would materialize. The very next day, my wife was on a mission wholly unrelated to the buying of foreign language tomes. She happened to stop into a place called "The Jerusalem Cafe" (or, as that other language would have it: ירשלים קפה) for a take-out falafel. While waiting for it, she decided to go into the second-hand (pre-loved?) bookstore across the mall from the Cafe. A year ago I bought a Hebrew Bible (both the תנ"ך & the ברית החדשה) there for only $14! So she happened to remember my prayer the evening before and asked the man at the counter if he had a Hebrew dictionary. He said he didn't, but he did have a "Hebrew Lexicon"...

It's a beautiful, mint condition Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew English Lexicon and she got it for a song. Isn't HaShem the Best!

ברך הבא בשם יהוה ישוע המשח המלך העולם

Just found out this morning that my Beall and Banks Old Testament Parsing Guides are keyed to my new BDB Lexicon, too!


Lehitraot,
μαρτυς

Cast Out Even a Little Leaven

In the study of Another Gospel, we learned that the sin in our “outer man” is removed through suffering in the flesh for Christ’s sake and that we are thereby perfected and made righteous—pleasing and acceptable—to God. We are purified by the fiery trials; as it says in 1 Peter 4:12-15:

¹² Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: ¹³ But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy. ¹⁴ If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you. On their part he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified. ¹⁵ If any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.

And we must understand that the phrase “for His sake” has two senses: One, directly, as when we preach and confess Christ (the Truth) and are persecuted for it; and, two, indirectly, meaning “the opposite of our own sake”—denying our selves (E.g. “turning the other cheek”).

By the way, we see a great example of this process in 1 Corinthians 5, where the Apostle Paul is telling the Corinthian Church what to do with the member who is committing “such fornication that is not so much as named among the Gentiles”. From verse 5:5, we read:

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

So even this heinous sin can be removed through suffering in the flesh. In verse 7, Paul chastises the Corinthians for keeping the man in their midst:

Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened.

As we know from Jesus in Matthew 16:11-12, “leaven” is “pride or self-serving doctrine”:

¹¹ How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees? ¹² Then understood they how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

This man’s self-serving doctrine convinced him that it was okay to fellowship even while living in unrepentant sin. Paul tells them to “purge out” (“purge out” is one Greek word meaning to “clean out” or “prune”) this “old leaven” so the Church would be “unleavened”—clean.

We have here an analogy of the individual human body with the Church. As sin must be purged out of our flesh to cleanse it, so too must corrupt doctrine be purged from the Bride of Christ to cleanse her; both involve suffering, “mortifying the members”.

By the way, this story of grievous sin in the Corinthian Church might possibly have had a happy ending. If we look at the 2^nd Chapter of Paul’s next letter to the Corinthians, we read from Verse 4 on:

⁴ For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you. ⁵ But if any have caused grief, he hath not grieved me, but in part: that I may not overcharge you all. ⁶ Sufficient to such a man is this punishment, which was inflicted of many. ⁷ So that contrariwise ye ought rather to forgive him, and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. ⁸ Wherefore I beseech you that ye would confirm your love toward him.

If the person Paul is speaking of here is the same man—and there was certainly no one else Paul wrote about in 1 Corinthians who was to receive a “punishment” “inflicted of many”—then it would appear that the fellow repented sufficiently to move Paul to instruct the Corinthians to let the poor wretch back into the fellowship.

Bible Study Update

Just added another Bible Study to my Pages*--the tabs at the top of the blog marked Home, Against Another Gospel and, today's addition, The Parable Key. I delivered the study last Wednesday at my church. The version posted here has been slightly, but not meaningfully, edited (mostly punctuation).

Hope you enjoy it!



*NOTE 03/04/12: These Bible Studies have been taken down, but anyone interested can ask for copies. μαρτυς

I Heart Antioch & the Great Falling Away

I no longer hold the ideas expressed in this post with regards to modern Bible versions and the critical Greek NT (see here for more details). I'm leaving this post up as a reminder to me as to just how deeply immersed in error I can be and not know it. It is hoped that I'll remember this lesson should I ever be tempted to deal dismissively with an erring brother. J.K. 21/04/14





Time to look up, folks, the Great Falling Away is in its 11th hour…

The road from Antioch to Alexandria is hot, dry and full of vipers, but this hasn’t stopped what appears to be the majority of the North American (online?) Church from turning their backs to the sun en masse and heading for Egypt. Yes, with a mighty resolve, they divorced themselves once and for all from the Great King James Bible and took up with a harlot—the ESV.

Actually, the ESV is the second harlot, a lot of them shacked-up with the NIV first, then, developing a taste for strange flesh, traded her in for this new one. But they traded down, as the sports scouts say, and have no one but themselves to blame for the apostasy to follow.

It’s astounding just how many people have fallen for the relentless marketing tactics of Crossway Publishers (Jeff Riddle at stylos was too much of a gentleman to call it “relentless” on his blog last November, but he implied it). I’m sure many of the same people now quoting from the ESV would’ve turned their noses up at the RSV just a few year ago. What a difference a slick ad campaign can make, eh?

Well, thank God for people like the Dean Burgon Society. But not for fighting against this latest example of spiritual adultery. No, fighting the will of God isn’t such a good idea, so I don’t thank them for that, per se. I thank the Dean Burgon Society, and those like them, for cataloguing the slide and keeping the story of the True Original Greek Scriptures available for people like me to discover. What a hopeless generation we would be if it wasn’t for these Watchmen on the Walls.

And I personally would be in a heck of a state—I just knew there was something wrong with those Bibles, but didn’t know exactly what it was. I can’t thank them all enough!

Naturally, though, there are those who take the whole King James Only thing too far. Such a one is bibleprotector over on YouTube. While I admire his zeal for the KJB, I have to part company with him on his English Primacy theory:



To me, this just sounds like an English-speakers' ethnocentrism writ large. History tells us that most of the diaspora Jews spoke Greek in the 1st Century; more of them even reading the OT in Greek (the LXX) than in Hebrew. Koine Greek was spoken by the whole world 1500 years before English was developed and, along with Latin, for many years after that. A strong argument could be made that the Zephaniah prophecy was telling the Jews that YHWH would eventually use Greek to speak to His Elect; Koine Greek, the language of the Apostles, and a much purer language than English ever was (and much richer, deeper, more nuanced, etc). And lets not forget how the Ante-Nicene Fathers, such as Iranaeus, fought like terriers to preserve the wording of the Greek manuscripts. They were under no illusion as to what the real Λογος του Θεου looked like.

Still, at the end of the day, if everyone erred in favour of the KJV like bibleprotector, the reeling English-speaking Church would be a darned sight better off than it is now. Better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire...(Mat 18:9 KJV)

Chick Gospel Traktate

Still tooling around on my Who's Using the Wrong Bible tour. Naturally, this took me to the ugly-but-good Dean Burgon Society website (more on that in the next post). From there I followed a link to this Chick Tract (still going strong after 40 years!) about The Attack on the Word of God.

I also found this link to Chick Tracts IN GERMAN! I noticed they use the Luther Bible for all their quotations; I guess that's the Teutonic KJV. Süßer:



Ausgezeichnet!

What's Wrong with Dr John?

UPDATE 12/12/2016

This post is just an embarrassment now. It was only six years ago, but it's like looking at something you wrote when you were a teenager. Whew. Sorry ESV and sorry John MacArthur. Glad God brought me to a clearer understanding of Textual Criticism before I closed this blog (see here and here). Whew.

The ESV, because it is translation from a corrupt, heretical, non-canonical text, is a counterfeit Bible just like the NIV; just one more modernistic substitute for the Word of God in English.
—Howard King, Foundations Ministries

Just listened to a sermon by Howard King on SermonAudio.Com entitled “What’s Wrong with the ESV?” and am very glad I did! Highly recommended for anyone interested in evidence of how far the poison of apostasy has spread in the Church. (It is truly astounding how far the Great Falling Away has progressed.) King does a masterful job of refuting, not only the proponents of the ESV, but the giant hydra-headed mushroom of Textual Criticism itself.

I became aware of the Text Family controversy when I started studying Koine Greek a year ago and have been marvelling at the deceptions on the Critical Text side ever since. It took me a while to decide finally which side I was on, but, as a KJV advocate and despiser of the NIV, I'd heavily favoured the Textus Receptus/Majority Text arguments from the start. King’s sermon gives all the intellectual reasons why I'm firmly in the TR/MT camp now (just like crazy Jim Brown of the last post), but the deciding factor was the Greek NT that the Lord eventually put in my hands.

You see, I desperately wanted a Greek NT, but didn't want to get the wrong one. So, instead of just buying the first one I could find, I prayed and waited, prayed and waited, then, about two months into my Greek lessons (I was teaching myself via the internet, J.W. Wenham's Elements, and James Voelz's podcast), I had occasion to buy a used, inexpesive copy of Scrivener's THE NEW TESTAMENT IN GREEK ACCORDING TO THE TEXT FOLLOWED IN THE AUTHORISED VERSION TOGETHER WITH THE VARIATIONS ADOPTED IN THE REVISED VERSION (man, I love that title). Talk about a two-fer!

Anyway, I found King's sermon while googling for info on the presumptuously titled English Standard Version, after hearing that a disreputable outfit called the National Council of Churches [spit] was sitting somewhere down the murky ESV profit track. King’s sermon confirmed this rumour (apparently they hold the rights to the RSV which the ESV is based on; in fact, less than 10% of the RSV was altered to produce the ESV), along with many others.

Actually, I’d only become acquainted with this warmed-over RSV very recently; first as the RefTagger Bible Version over at Pyromaniacs (see the link on my Blog Roll), then as the text of the John MacArthur Study Bible, in luxurious Tru-Tone® Blue for only $55, where “John’s goal is to let the Bible speak for itself—nothing more, nothing less” by including notes “based on [his] verse-by-verse approach to the Bible and nearly forty years of careful study”.

Is the reason for this clear approval of the ESV by MacArthur (and his friends at Pyro) as obvious as it is worrying? The publishers of the ESV are Crossway Books (the book publishing arm of Good News Publishers) who proudly proclaim on their website that “Since its inception in 1979, Crossway Books has been privileged to publish more than 1,500 different titles, including books by…John MacArthur”. Here’s John’s page on Crossway’s Authors listings. Has John MacArthur, or someone very high up in his Ministry’s brain trust, made a deal with the Devil and agreed to promulgate a deceiving, antichrist translation of the Λογος του Θεου in order to sell a pile of his marginal pencil scratchings?

Okay, that last question might've been a bit unfair, but you have to admit that something stinks at Grace to You. Maybe Dr John has become too famous. I mean, all his supporters will tell you how godly and educated and un-PC "Doctor John MacArthur" is and point you to all his Larry King appearances and YouTube sermons, but, please, at the end of the day, he did put his name on the cover of the Bible. The Holy Bible. To sell it and make money.

And his name's in the larger font.

Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. (Luke 6:26)

Then again, given all that, it's probably a good thing for his sake that the MacArthur Study Bible isn't a real Bible after all...


UPDATE: Since posting about the ESV & John MacArthur, I've been wheeling around the intertubes seeing how common the ESV is and getting more creeped out by the minute. Seems like I've been hopelessly out of the loop here in New Zealand; looks like everybody and his little brother in the US is using the ESV!

Oh well, thank God for Howard King above and the well-researched Terry Watkins.