Rich,
You said, “If you would like to show us any place where the doctrine of Providence has required that God work only through the regenerate then make your case that way but use the Scriptures or good and necessary consequence to demonstrate it.”
I will seek to do just that, but remember we are not talking of Providence generally, but of the providential care and transmission of His written word. I have brought this up before and no one cared to interact with it: We have a Regulative Principle with regard to worship – how we approach our God as we gather unto Him as the church – but not as regards the
foundation itself of the RPW, that is, from whence we derive regulative principles: God’s word. That has become, in the Christian era, an almost haphazard activity: we allow that virtually anyone with expertise may put their hand to it. But is such an allowance warranted by Scripture? Further, is it
commanded by Scripture, such as we base our RPW upon? No? How odd then, that downstream from the source we say the pure water of the word says thus and thus, and we act on it; but we allow – contrary to all Scripture – the very source of the word, our Bible, to be not only handled but actually
determined by the ungodly! And with gruesome consequences: I recently learned that because of a CT reading supplanting the TR the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper have been changed, “This is my body, broken for you…” now having “broken”
removed in the PCA’s Book of Church Order, and at the Lord’s Table in a church I know. In my eyes that is loathsome!
And I have brought up the idea questioning if it were even
conceivable the priests the Levites (to whom were given the possession and care of the Scriptures – cf
Deut 17:18; 31:9-13, 24-26 – and this would include their preservation and reproduction) that they would allow the wise and linguistically expert scholars of Egypt or Babylon to come and work on the scrolls of the law and the prophets containing the words of the true God, Jehovah of Israel? First, these scrolls were kept in the temple, yea, the prototype – the exemplar – “in the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God” (Deut 31:26), and do you think any alien would have been allowed to get that close to it and still live?
Is there a “general equity” that would be applicable in this case? Such as the care of the mss of the sayings of
God the Son, who brought the final and very words of Jehovah to humankind? Would not the possession and care of these be given, with the disbanding of the Levitical priesthood, to the High Priest and those His seed, the new priesthood of believers?
We have in Isaiah 59:20-21, these words:
And the Redeemer shall come to Zion,
and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the LORD.
As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD;
My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth,
shall not depart out of thy mouth,
nor out of the mouth of thy seed,
nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the LORD,
from henceforth and for ever.
This covenant is made with Christ, and with His seed.
Returning now to the matter of Dr. Bruce Metzger and his
determining the actual text of what God the Holy Spirit gave Matthew to write in the opening of his gospel. Metzger & Co. commenting on Matt 1:7 and 10, saying that Asaph and Amos are the apostle’s error (instead of the correct Asa and Amon in Christ’s lineage), declare that the apostle erred and so did his text. They assert the correct reading is Asaph and Amos, and so reads the CT Greek, and the ESV, one of the few versions with the “courage” to print that travesty.
It was the Committee which put together both the UBS 4 and NA 27 editions (Drs. Aland; J. Karavidopolous; Carlo Martini, and Bruce Metzger) that spoke on the matter of Asaph and Amos, through Dr. Metzger in his,
A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition:
Since, however, the evangelist may have derived material for the genealogy, not from the Old Testament directly, but from subsequent genealogical lists, in which the erroneous spelling occurred, the Committee saw no reason to adopt what appears to be a scribal emendation in the text of Matthew. (p.1)
This is the fruit of disobeying the Regulative Principle of Bible Preservation and Reproduction ((RPBPR): the unbeliever denies the inspiration of the New Testament Scripture, and we nonetheless bow the knee to his expertise in the language and mss and allow him his unbelieving say.
Yet the Scripture says of God, that “without faith it is impossible to please him” (Heb 11:6), and “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Rom 14:23). But we give the unholy a free pass because we proceed not on the footing of faith when it comes to textual matters, but of supposed scientific acumen, even though their unbelief shows like a smoking gun as they seek to snuff out the living words of the Most High.
Should I be faulted for insinuating Dr. Metzger is among the unholy? Consider this:
Bruce Manning Metzger is renown as a textual critic; he is one of the editors of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (a modern edition of W&H’s Greek text), and George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature, Princeton Theological Seminary. He was the chairman for the
Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible (which removed 40% of the Bible text, including the warning of Revelation 22:18-19), and he wrote the introductions to each book of this abbreviated “Bible.” In these he denies the authorship by Moses of the Pentateuch, and the writing of Daniel by Daniel (instead, he says, written by others in 168-165 B.C – whereas abundant evidence proves he wrote in approx. 605 – 536 B.C.).* Metzger was co-editor of the
New Oxford Annotated Bible RSV (NOAB-RSV), and wrote many of the notes in this Bible and put his editorial stamp of approval on all the others. In the section, “Introduction to the Old Testament,” is written, “The Old Testament may be described as the literary expression of the religious life of ancient Israel…The Israelites were more history-conscious than any other people in the ancient world. Probably as early as the time of David and Solomon,
out of a matrix of myth, legend, and history, there has appeared the earliest written form of the story of the saving acts of God from Creation to the conquest of the Promised Land…
Thus the Pentateuch took shape over a long period of time.” [bold emphases added]
But this is not true criticism or exegesis, this is the thinking of a rationalistic unbeliever. It matters not how famous a man may be, a red flag of danger should go up if he says of the Book of Job it is an “ancient folktale,” and of Jonah it is “from the realm of popular legend” (both of these from the same notes in the NOAB-RSV as the above), and of the Book of Genesis, “The opening chapters of the Old Testament deal with human origins. They are not to be read as history…These chapters are followed by the stories of the patriarchs, which preserve ancient traditions now known to reflect the conditions of the times of which they tell, though they cannot be treated as strictly historical…it is not for history but for religion that they are preserved…” (Notes from “How To Read The Bible With Understanding” in the NOAB-RSV).**
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Footnotes:
* The dates and events Daniel gives are historically solid, attested to by internal evidences (including the teaching of Jesus Christ in the N.T.), corroborating histories of other nations, and archeological discoveries. The unbelieving modernists cannot stand that Daniel made accurate prophesies which all came true to the letter, so they claim someone else wrote them centuries later, after the events happened! For an extended and in-depth treatment, see Robert Dick Wilson’s,
Studies In The Book of Daniel, 2 volumes (MI, Baker, 1972); also Josh McDowell’s,
Daniel In The Critics’ Den (CA, Here’s Life Publishers, 1979). Edward J. Young,
An Introduction to the Old Testament, (MI, Eerdmans, 1977), pp. 360-377; and also his,
A Commentary on Daniel, (PA, Banner of Truth, 1972), pp. 15-26, ff.; Gleason L. Archer,
A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, (IL, Moody Press, 1994), pp. 421-447. These are but five among many able defenses of the integrity of the Book of Daniel.
** Cited in,
Modern Versions Founded upon Apostasy, by David W. Cloud (WA: Way of Life Literature, 3rd ed. 1997), pages, 41, 42, 43, 44.
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I would say, whoever denies the historicity of the opening chapters of Genesis – the creation, the Fall, the proto-evangelion, the “progress” of the human race from these beginnings – denies the basic realities of the human condition as the Scripture reveals them, and the need for the salvation that only God can provide, and that through Christ.
If the Biblical beginnings of humankind are only myth (this includes the accounts of the patriarchs) – not to be considered historical, but only pertaining to “religion” –
then the Christian faith is nonsense. I cannot imagine a living faith in Christ as the atoning Saviour from the crushing weight of the guilt and power of sin in one who promotes such views.
It is one thing for a man’s theology to be faulty – even greatly so – and he still be saved. When one denies the basic foundation of the Biblical revelation, and faith in it, this is saying of the Bible, “I don’t believe Genesis is historic but rather the religious account of a people to whom history and religion are important.” If there is no historic fall as per Genesis, a Saviour making atonement for the sin of humankind is both unnecessary, and a sham.
We have violated the principles regulating the care and reproduction of God’s word, and the modern Christian mind revels in it; but this travesty has intruded its foul print in the very core of our worship – despite all the high verbiage lauding our adherence to the RPW! – by erasing the very word our Lord Jesus spoke concerning the broken bread signifying His broken body! Even the RPW has been violated by this transgression.
