How Perfect Does the Bible Need to Be? Abraham’s Age…

For all you believers and skeptics… If all Scripture is inspired by God, does that also mean there can never be any grammatical errors, or errors in the copies and translations over time? Exactly how perfect does the Bible need to be in order for God to exist?

Two things occurred to me yesterday. One is that many people reject God because the Bible is “proven wrong” by difficult to understand passages, or even by mistakes made in copying the Scriptures, or by a corruption in the original text by later scribes. While two… at the same time there have always been noted differences in the manuscript copies (there ARE tens of thousands of them, which is tens of thousands more than any other ancient documents) as well as syntax and grammatical errors by the writers, or debates over the original sentence structure here or there.

How much do those things matter?

For instance, how old was Abraham when he left Haran for the land of Canaan?

Sermon on Tithing/Giving

Mar 10:21 Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
Mar 10:22 At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”
-Mark 10:23

It’s amazing how little solid teaching is done on the idea of giving and tithing. When I speak of solid teaching, I mean teaching that includes all the principles of the entire Bible, not just part of it. At fault seems to be a focus on me, myself and I. What am I going to get out of it?

Well, what are you going to get if you tithe? Some would say more than you give. In fact, if you give 10%, the Lord will repay you 20% or more… If you sow sparingly, you reap sparingly, and if you sow generously, you will reap generously. So says I Corinthians 9:6, and it’s even better in the book of Malachi. There the Bible says,

“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.” – Malachi 3:10

How can you argue with that?

Why Bible Lessons Are Often Boring

I picked up my weekly reading material at the church today. It’s a magazine called the Lookout, which let me say, is often a wonderful read. It is the standard magazine for independent Christian Churches, along with its little brother “The Christian Standard.” Ministers and writers from Christian Churches and the independent Churches of Christ do most of the writing in these publications. It is often thoughtful, insightful, very deep and filled with (as we like to say in the ministry) “meat.”

If you’re a vegetarian, what would you use as a figure of speech? “That’s got a lot of …fiber… in it?” yeahhh, not sure veggies can substitute as well in a sentence…

At any rate, the Lookout has been running a 3 week series on the minor prophets. The minor prophets are the books of the Old Testament after Ezekiel, which would include Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. (Yes I did write those without looking.) They are called minor prophets simply because they are shorter books, not because they are less important. In fact, many of the Scriptures contained in these books are right smack in the middle of controversial topics such as those surrounding the return of Christ and the end of the world.

Which is why it strikes me as such a shame that we can so easily take these Scriptures and write boring articles about them.