Is the Bible the word of God? Yes, it is, but mostly not from God, directly: it is a human endeavor to interpret the proper meaning of the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin words that the Bible was originally written in over the millennia.
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For a couple of years, I was attending a Hebraic Roots congregation and was honored to be able to give the Shabbat message on a regular basis. One time, I said that the Bible was a book about God, but it wasn’t God, and someone (a man I respect and know to be faithful) stood up and walked out on me!
So many people believe that the Bible is the direct, absolute, and holy word from God, himself, to the point where they almost worship the physical book they are holding as if it was God!
And then they write all over it!
God is never changing, right? He is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow, but the Bible is not unchanging, and certainly every single Bible out there is not the same.
Did you know that under copyright laws that if I published a Bible and copyrighted it, that if someone else wanted to publish a Bible, their Bible must have hundreds- yes, hundreds!- of words different from mine, otherwise it is a violation of the copyright law.
Did you also know that the Bible is available in no less than 704 languages? Now, we all know that old adage about how something is lost in the translation, right? Well, since the Torah (the first 5 books) is the ONLY place in the entire Bible where God speaks to us, directly (with Moses taking dictation), that is the only place where we can trustfully say is the word of God. And that being true only if written in the Hebrew.
FYI: when the Sofer (scribe) writes a new Torah scroll, he copies every single letter directly from an older scroll, and at the end of each page counts every letter to ensure that there isn’t anything missing. That is why the Torah scroll, in Hebrew, is the only dependable source document where we can say it is the Word of God because it has been copied exactly for millennia.
The Bible is not God- it is a book about God (everyone still here?). As such, when we read it, depending on the version we are using, we have to remember that we cannot take every single word as what God really said.
So, nu? If I can’t believe what I am reading in the Bible, how can I believe in what the Bible says?
By using discernment, asking the Ruach haKodesh (Holy Spirit) to guide your understanding, and more than anything else, to read the Bible many times, using a couple of different versions, so that you can get a rounded education and better understand what seems to be more in line with how God works.
I know, I know- God says do not add to or take away from anything he says, but if we go along with that then we really have to reject the entire New Covenant as having any influence in our worship or lifestyle, separate from the Torah commandments, because it isn’t from God.
The New Covenant is written by men: it has the eyewitness accounts of the life and ministry of Yeshua (that’s the Gospels), the narrative of experiences that the Apostles (that’s Acts), the letters that Shaul and others wrote to congregations needing guidance because of the problems they were having (we call them the Epistles), and finally we have the vision John had, which is so difficult to understand in any language.
I am not saying to throw away the Bible, or not to trust it, or to ignore what you don’t like in it because you can just excuse it as being an improper interpretation by some human.
No!
What I am saying is that whichever version of the Bible you use, remember that it is a book about God written by someone who has tried to understand what the original language meant, and that the interpretation will be affected by whichever “original” language that interpreter is working from, not to mention the person’s individual understanding, knowledge, and bias (which is always going to be present).
The way to feel comfy cozy with your Bible is to read a couple of different versions, read them often from front to back (Genesis to Revelation), and use discernment and hermeneutics to determine which version sounds the most like the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as he describes himself in the Torah.
I can’t speak for God, and would not even think of trying, but I believe that when he told us who he is and what he wants of us in the Torah that he is saying we don’t need to know anything else about how to worship him and how to treat each other. In the rest of the Old Covenant, we learn what to expect from the Messiah, and the Gospels tell us of the life of the Messiah.
It is then up to each and every one of us to accept or reject that Yeshua is the Messiah God promised to send.
Thank you for being here and please shares these messages with everyone you know. That’s it for this week, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!
