SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/27/2016 11:01 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT- Introduction to John 8:12-21
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 8:12-21
Message of the verses: This is going to be one of my Spiritual
Diaries that is different, and it will be rather short too. We have just spent the last week or so going
over John 7:53-8:11 and we spoke about how these verses were not in the original
text but seemed to fit into where they are found in John’s gospel. John MacArthur preached his sermon on this
section in 1970, which was the first gospel that he preached through after
getting to the church in 1969. Now in
other Spiritual Diaries I have mentioned that there were times when he seemed
to change his mind from when he was preaching in 1970 and now when he is
preaching once again through the gospel of John beginning around 2013. Well this is another of those times, and I am
very sure that it took a lot of his time to come to the conclusion that he came
to as he begins this sermon which he entitles “I Am the Light of the World.” Now I do want to say that the things that we
studied over the last week or so are things that probably happened in the life
of Jesus as we went over in our studies.
However we will see from my quote from this sermon by MacArthur that
even though the things we learned were true as far as what we learned through
these verses that they probably did not happen at the time in which they were
put in John’s gospel and he will explain more about them in the quote. I surely do not reject studying these verses
as I learned much from them and I hope all who read those SD’s learned much
from them too. I will give the quote
from John MacArthur at this time and then we will do another introduction in
our next SD.
“And at this particular point, I face a decision, which I’ve already made, and I’ll explain. This familiar story, which actually embraces the last verse in chapter 7, the one that says everyone went to his home, this familiar story does not appear in the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament. It does not appear in any of them at all. Manuscript study is very important to guaranteeing the truthfulness of the text. There are about 25,000 New Testament manuscripts, ancient manuscripts.
“The oldest of those uniformly do not contain this
story. And so you will find in your Bible probably a note in the margin
that says, “Later manuscripts added this,” and that is correct. Because
we have so many manuscripts, there’s really little doubt that this was added later.
If something isn’t in the oldest and shows up later, obviously it was
added.
“There’s nothing in this story that is un-Christ
like or unlike the behavior of Jesus. There’s really nothing in the story
that’s unlike the behavior of the religious leaders. It’s a wonderful
story of forgiveness. Very likely, something like this happened and was
passed down orally from person to person to person, and eventually, someone
decided that the story ought to find its way into the New Testament, even
though it wasn’t in the original.
“And so they put it there. In most old
manuscripts, it is placed here. But sometimes in Old Manuscripts, we find
it somewhere else in the Gospel of John, and we even find it sometimes in the
Gospel of Luke. So apparently, it was a story that floated around that
somebody decided should find its way into the New Testament.
“The problem with that is the church from its
earliest years has known it didn’t belong there. In fact, if you’re
looking for ancient commentaries on this story written by church fathers and
leaders, you won’t find one until the 12th century. And even when you
start to find the commentary in the 12th century, the notation is made that
this doesn’t appear in the earliest manuscripts. Why is it here?
Because somebody put it in. Why is it in your Bible now?
“Because once it found its way in, it became
traditionally a part of Scripture, and apparently, Bible translators are
unwilling to remove it, so they just put a notation. I’m happy to tell
you that when this does happen, and it happens here, and it happened also at
the end of Mark, there is a similar addition to the Gospel of Mark in the 16th
chapter from verse 9 on. I’m happy to tell you we know they are additions
because we have those ancient manuscripts.
“Consequently, we know that the Holy Spirit has
then enabled us to preserve the true text. I have written some notes
about this story in the study Bible footnotes. I’ve written something
about this in the commentary on John in deference to people who would be
interested in some kind of an interpretation, but the problem is if it didn’t
appear in the original text, then it is not inerrant. There’s no
guarantee that it’s accurate. There’s no guarantee that it’s without
error, like every other part of Scripture.
“Furthermore,
it interrupts the story that’s going on here. I guess you could
call this internal evidence. It interrupts the story. We are at
this point starting in chapter 7 with Jesus at the feast of tabernacles.
It lasted a week in the fall of his final year, six months from the
cross. We have been going through the events when he arrived in the
middle of the week, went to the temple and began to teach. What follows
this story in verse 12 is part of the ministry that Jesus had during the feast of
tabernacles.
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: I have
always had problems with verses that were added into different parts of the
Word of God, and yet as stated I did learn much from John 7:53-8:11 as I was
studying it. I just have to be careful
to believe what the Word of God teaches, especially when I put it onto my blogs
as I would never want to lead anyone astray in what I write.
My Steps of Faith for Today: To continue to study, to continue to fight the good fight and to remember the words of the psalmist “O give us help against the adversary, For deliverance by man is in vain.”
Memory verses for the week: 2 Corinthians 12:7-8 “Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me-to keep me from exalting myself. 8 Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me.”
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “The 23rd.”
Today’s Bible question: “How did Elisha get back the ax head that fell into the river?”
Answer in our next SD.
5/27/2016 11:31 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment