Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Is Everything "Divinely Preserved"?

"T. Austin Sparks makes the case that God's Book was divinely preserved and ordered in the way we have it."

Does that include the marginal notes in the 1611 KJV, such as the one at Luke 17:36 that informs the reader that this verse should not be there as it does not exist in the majority of Greek copies? The same marginal note that exists in all translations today?

Does that include chapters and verses, which are 700 and 500 years old respectively? The earliest English Bibles, such as Wycliffe and Tyndale, only had chapters as the verse system had not been invented yet.

Does that include the Apocrypha? These books were part of every Bible up until the late 1800s.

Does that include cross references? Regardless of who is behind the translation, these are often incorrect and are only cross linked because the translators believed there was a connection. There are older Bibles that even have cross references to the Apocrypha!

Does that include a Concordance?

Where do we draw the line?

T. Austin Sparks, as with all KJV-Onlyists and Ruckmanites, did not have a clue what he was talking about. To him, every aspect invented by the human mind is "divine preservation." He does not have a clue what genuine divine preservation is. God's Word is preserved in the extant manuscript copies we have of the original autographs — not in the KJV!

No, the order in which our Bible appears is not divinely preserved. God had nothing to do with its order. When they first started binding books, they bound them with the author's largest work first and their smallest work last, regardless of chronology. They did this with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. Does T. Austin Sparks want to try and tell me that God "divinely preserved" those works in that order, too?

Paul's letters are bound in the exact same way, but in two different groupings. His letters to the churches are first, arranged from longest to shortest, followed by personal letters, arranged from longest to shortest. Sorry, but this is no way to understand the New Testament.

God is not the author of confusion, and the long established order we find our Bibles in is chaotic. Man bound the Scriptures together. Man decided the order. Man included the Apocrypha (Which, if they are not inspired, do you really think God would have included them?). Man added the chapter system. Man added the verse system. Man added the cross references and marginal notes. Man added a concordance. If God had laid out the Bible by divine preservation, it would have been perfect in every single detail.  Sorry, but T. Austin Sparks was wrong!