Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
However, what happens if and when we do commit sin? Have we tried in vain to be holy? Do we start all the way back at the beginning and lose the spiritual ground we’ve gained?
The city of Smyrna was located approximately thirty-five miles north of Ephesus. It was a prosperous city with a population of over one hundred thousand in John’s day (c. A.D. 95). That location had been inhabited for over three thousand years and no one knows for sure who founded Smyrna or exactly when it was established.
Ancient biographies often opened with the noble background of their subject, background that would shed light on the identity or character of the person about whom they wrote.
In Josiah’s day, the book of the law was found in the temple, and Josiah’s humble response to its demands changed his generation. Jesus later confronted religious teachers of His day who, for all their attention to the law, had often buried it beneath their religious traditions.
We have grammatical-historical-interpretation and grammatical-critical-historical interpretation. The former preserved objectivity in interpretation, the latter subjectivity. The former preserved the integrity and trustworthiness of the Bible writers and the text; the latter made both the Bible writer and the text untrustworthy. In other words, New Hermeneutics, with its pseudo-scholarship has done nothing more than weaken and demoralize people’s assurance in the Bible being the inspired and fully inerrant Word of God.
Most people who read the Bible do so without a clearly defined goal. It is better to study the Bible with a more defined purpose in mind, for its subject matter and its intended meaning.
Knowledge of the original languages can get you even farther. If you have the opportunity to learn the languages, take it. If you have learned the languages, use every opportunity to deepen your knowledge of them. If neither, learn to use responsibly the various study tools now available to help you in your study of God’s Word.
How many times have we been in church listening to the preacher do a good job expositing (explaining) the text? At some point, he says “Now, what the Greek actually says is…” At that pronouncement, the congregation grows a little quieter and a little more attentive. Why is that?
There are 320 Greek New Testament direct quotations passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. According to a listing published by Westcott and Hort, the combined total of quotations and references is some 890. (The New Testament in the Original Greek, Graz, 1974, Vol. I, pp. 581-595)
In the United States, there are 350,000 churches, making up hundreds of denominations. Eighty percent of these are stagnant, with nineteen percent growing only through childbirth, and less than one percent being by conversion. Moreover, there is a great divide among those Christians, who make up these churches. How can we as Christians turn this around, and find unity amongst ourselves? As Pilate said, “What is truth?”