The Bible

Thought for Today
Dec. 23

THE KING JAMES VERSION AND THE WORD OF GOD

The Bible is not the Word of God, and there is not even the slightest reason for God's children to believe it is. The Bible itself never claims to be the Word of God; then, why should we believe that? To discover who first called the Bible the Word of God would be an interesting mystery in Christian history to solve. What was that man's agenda, I wonder? Who was he attempting to impress? He may have been trying, albeit in the flesh, to give honor to God for giving us that Book of all books, but to call a book the Word of God is to show disrespect to the living Word of God, and it betrays a lack of experience with Jesus. Anyone who has personally heard from God knows the difference between what God now says (the Word of God) and the written record of what He said in the past (the Bible).

The Word of God cannot be sold at your local religious bookstore for $29.95, or for any other price. The Word of God cannot be sold at all. Paul told Timothy, "the word of God is not bound." But the Bible is "bound"; some Bibles are bound in leather jackets; some are bound in cloth; some, in paper.

The Word of God is whatever God says, and He is still talking. In the Bible, whenever the Word of God came to a prophet, it came verbally. We read over and over in the Old Testament, "The word of God came, saying . . ." Jesus is called the Word of God in Revelation 19 because he is the "express image" of God. The holy Spirit is called the Word of God in Ephesians 6:17 because God's thoughts and feelings are communicated to us through His Spirit. The Word of God is a living thing; in fact, it gives us life! Peter said that the saints are born again "not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever" (1 Pet. 1:23). To ignore what the Bible itself says and to say that the Bible is the Word of God is to yield to the pressure of an over-religious spirit that simply is not of God.

For a complete treatment of this subject, you can read my little book, Is The Bible The Word of God?

There is only one version of the Word of God; God only says what He says. But there are hundreds of versions of the Bible. The King James Version of the holy Bible (KJV) is the most trustworthy version of the Bible that I have found. Many years ago now, for example, I determined to learn the book of Proverbs perfectly. I read it carefully, using the KJV. Every time I came to a verse that was worded strangely or was difficult to understand, I would open other, more modern versions of the Bible for clarification. Then, I would open my Hebrew bible and read it in the original language. A pattern emerged. I saw repeatedly that when the KJV was difficult to understand, the Hebrew was equally difficult to understand. And I saw that when the Hebrew was obscure, the translators of other modern versions of the Bible would frequently make something up in an attempt to overcome the difficulty in translation. From that experience, I learned to trust even the obscure KJV passages. I learned that the translators of the KJV in 1611 felt no pressure to force the Scriptures to "make sense" and that they were comfortable simply communicating faithfully to the reader whatever difficulties in translation that the original text presented to them.

Paul said that while Jews demand a sign, we Gentiles stumble in faith when it comes to what we call "wisdom". In other words, the Jews' nature is to demand miracles, and the Gentiles' nature is to doubt miracles. It is the nature of Gentiles to refuse to follow something that doesn't make us appear to be wise; Gentiles have difficulty trusting their souls to something that doesn't "make sense". This is why so many modern translators are tempted to add to, or subtract from the original languages in order to smooth over obtuse passages of Hebrew and Greek. The Gentile mind, left to its own devices, demands that everything must "make sense" so that it may feel wise. For one glaring example, the carnal mind of Gentiles cannot comprehend God's power to create, so it invented a doctrine that it pretends to understand, the doctrine of Evolution, and promotes it as the real explanation of life on earth.

The fact that the translators of the KJV overcame, to a large extent, that kind of temptation and translated the difficult Hebrew into equally difficult English gibes me a high regard for their work. And this is why I say that the KJV is the most faithful translation of the original Greek and Hebrew of all the translations I have used. It is a translation slandered by many today as archaic, and to a small extent it is, but it is beautifully, poetically written and, despite its bad publicity, is not difficult to understand. So, I will defend the King James Version as the best of all translations to date. However, I am not obsessed with it, as some believers are, to the point of claiming that it is the inviolate Word of God and that it contains no errors. I know for a fact that the King James Version does contain some errors in translation, blatant errors that cannot be defended. Some of those errors are the result of the King James translators' faith in certain false doctrines, such as the bizarre doctrine of the "holy Trinity".

In the coming days, I will point out some of these obvious errors in the KJV, not to denigrate the KJV, as so many today are doing, but because those errors need to be recognized by those who, like me, use the KJV as their Bible. I trust the KJV, to the point at which it is so obviously wrong that I cannot ignore it. Anyone who has known me over the past thirty years can tell you that when I am reading the Bible and come across a verse that seems strange to me, my first assumption is that I am ignorant and the Bible is right. But when the translation of that verse itself is incongruent with what the Bible says in other places, and when I can see a clear attempt by the translator to bend the meaning of certain Hebrew or Greek words to match what they themselves believe, then I have to confess that in those cases, the translators abused their authority to translate to the reader the true meaning of the original writer's words.

Be doubtful of my purpose if you must, but be honest with yourself. If I present to you incontrovertible evidence of mistranslation, admit that it happened. Don't hide behind a misguided reverence for the KJV. Doing so may fulfill the natural Gentile desire to appear wise, but in God's sight, it is very, very foolish.