Loose ends, hurricanes, politics, Bible versions

Well, New Orleans wasn't God's target this time after all. I do wonder however if prayer might have deflected it because if you look at a map of Gustav's track you can see that it made a little jog to the West just as it passed that city as if intentionally keeping some distance from it. Certainly there was a lot of prayer out there.

Then there's the scandal about Sarah Palin's daughter that just reared its ugly head. Obama is right, the families of politicians should be out of bounds for news hounds, it's nobody's business but the family's, but that isn't going to happen in our news-mad age. Of course the sexual acting out of a child of a Christian does disappoint, but more disappointing was the response of her parents. I personally think some disappointment on their part should have been expressed in some quiet way -- Palin is good with the words, I'm sure she could have found the right ones --along with the family support for the daughter in spite of it of course. But all we got was the support part, and the support was overboard in my opinion. Could have done without the enthusiasm, the "beautiful daughter" part and how proud they are of her and the grandchild to come. Seems to me that just feeds the liberal position that there's nothing wrong with sex outside marriage. No disappointment, no sanctions, no consequences, except of course she'll have to grow up sooner than anticipated etc. Weak. Too bad.

I'm stalled on the Bible versions topic, don't know for how long, got into a debate on another board, this time with a new versions defender for a change instead of a King-James-Only defender. Unfortunately made me appreciate just how dug in people are in the new versions. Then talked to a friend who trusts in her Revised Standard Version and thinks it's particularly trustworthy because whenever the pastor gives the translation of a passage that he says is the best rendering of the Greek, it's the same one she has in her RSV. Of course he's consulting with the same texts her Bible is based on but I thought better of trying to explain that. Encountering such entrenched belief in people I know to be truly Christians makes my effort on the subject seem a lost cause. I don't think I'll give up but I'll probably take a breather.

Got back into some good recent teachings by Zac Poonen in the meantime -- always inspiring, and I need spiritual bolstering after getting too involved in intellectual debate. http://rlcfchurch.org/ (go to "Sermons").

Mullings on God's will in hurricanes and politics

I just keep thinking about it. It makes me very sad. The God, THE God, the God of all things, the one and only, the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the God who made the world and everything in it, God who deserves the worship of every one of His creatures, God who puts up with those who hate Him, who is even good to those who hate Him, God who hears the prayers of those who acknowledge Him, is forgotten and ignored in our sophisticated time. He is also ignored by those who seek Him where He has not put His name, in the false religions. He has only put His name on His word, and on the people of the Bible. Then there are people who claim to be Christians who aren't. Then there are the Christians, those who do belong to Him, who nevertheless don't live up to our calling, who don't seek Him as we should, who don't obey Him as He has clearly told us to in His word, who remain stupid in the face of acts of God when of all people we should know what is going on because of all people we should know HIM.
So this hurricane comes and maybe we'll hear a call to pray, but when do we hear a call to humble ourselves and repent in sackcloth and ashes for the sins that have deserved the hurricane? The sins of the CHURCH, mind you, even before the sins of the nation: we're to turn from OUR wicked ways it says in 2 Chron 7:14.

So the twin towers of New York are demolished and people say "God bless America" but very very few would admit that it was God's doing. Of course it was the doing of Muslim jihadists, but isn't God in charge of the actions of Muslim jihadists as well as everyone else? They are merely instruments in God's hands, just as the Assyrians and the Babylonians and other great empires were God's instruments of judgment against God's own people as reported in the Old Testament.

I heard I think four sermons that acknowledged that 9/11 was God's judgment, only because local Christian radio sought them out and played them as a series well after the event, and I doubt there were many more than that across the nation. Everybody else was saying God wouldn't do such a thing, or if He did there is no way to know why, and so on. But what a myopic view of it, what a shame if such things are said by people who call themselves Christians. Of course we can't know why in the case of individuals, the persons who died in such catastrophes, that's only for God to know -- He takes the unrighteous AND the righteous according to His own timetable. In the case of the attack on the World Trade Center He showed more mercy than judgment -- there were so few who died compared to the numbers that could have been killed, and there were many miracle rescue stories, all heartening signs of His mercy in judgment. But if we know the Bible at all we ought to be able to surmise that God is saying something to the nation as a whole in such a disaster. But it seems we don't. The church is backslidden, out of touch with God. The church needs to repent.

So we're sitting and watching for Gustav to hit. I for one am not going to pray that God will deflect the hurricane. He's not going to let many be killed, there's been time for a massive evacuation, but a nation that doesn't give God the glory, that doesn't recognize its own sins, that doesn't repent and seek His face, doesn't deserve to be spared His judgments. Elijah prayed for famine on Israel because they had left their God for the pagan demon god Baal. America has done the same. I wonder if anything will turn us back? How hard does God have to hit us? Or will we just continue to say it's only Nature, just a matter for government and human ingenuity to deal with?

Repentance from sin COULD stop Gustav in its tracks, people, yes, even at the last minute!

Amos 3:6: . . .shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?

Especially the people of New Orleans should do this, especially any who consider themselves Christians, but in fact any of them.

All that's needed is a recognition of the sins of the city and of the nation and people getting on their knees by the hundreds, preferably thousands, to confess and repent of those sins and ask for God's mercy. On top of the known sins of New Orleans, its general corruptions, its Mardi Gras celebration, there is also the crime wave that followed on Hurricane Katrina and the construction fraud. Repentance could start there at least.

Showing mercy for the sufferers of any disaster is God's requirement of us, but so is warning of his judgments which He isn't going to stop without repentance. American style we apply human knowhow to the problem. We set up an efficient system for escaping the city, we send in aid of every kind and we otherwise stand back and let Gustav do its thing, planning to pick up the pieces afterward. True, those systems weren't in place last time and the city took the full fury of hurricane Katrina, but that time all we heard was how they SHOULD have been in place, how remiss the government was. Well, I suppose it was, but that misses the point that HURRICANES ARE IN GOD'S POWER, and if they are going to destroy an American city that's by HIS design, and our REAL job is to seek His face to find out why and repent of the causes. There was no repentance for the causes of Katrina, just as there was no repentance for the causes of 9/11, and here God is going to send another walloping from His merciful hand of judgment, and the meaning of Gustav will likely also be ignored.

The Republican convention will be curtailed to some extent while various delegates and would-be attendees make themselves available to help with the expected devastation. Again, it's good to help the sufferers but what the Bible calls the "arm of flesh" which is human strength, is of no real use in the things of God if used without seeking Him. SO much better if those who consider themselves Christians among the Republican delegates got on their knees to plead for God's mercy on the nation.

I wrote President Bush after 9/11 to ask him to call a day of repentance and prayer for the nation then, as some previous Presidents of the US had done in the past. Of course he didn't. We've become "multicultural" in the last few decades (instead of the melting pot we used to be), and we might offend somebody if we acknowledged the one true God over the various false gods around the world, now worshiped by sizeable numbers of the American population. Again I'd ask Bush to do the same now, as Gustav approaches, but instead he's going to present his own presence in support of the sufferers as if he has any power over hurricanes. It's God's appeased wrath we need to be seeking, not our President's useless speeches.

Some of course called Katrina God's judgment, but they focused exclusively for some reason on an annual gay celebration there. Others have denied it and point out all the ways Katrina could have targeted that particular event but didn't. It's a fair point. There's rarely one cause for God's judgment but rather an accumulation of sins over years. Also, God's judgment may come as a cleansing, as the Flood did in Noah's day, as the Babylonian Captivity was for the land of Israel, and preventing the holding of a celebration dishonoring to God could be as much of the reason for a massive disaster as punishment. But that celebration does have to be listed among the sins of New Orleans to be repented of. Mardi Gras which has a pagan origin, a massive pagan celebration of the flesh before the Catholic period of Lent, has to be figured in the mix of sins. And in answer to this latter writer I linked, who asks why God would have waited 35 years to judge a city (or a few hundred years for that matter), anyone who knows the Bible knows that's how God works. Sins accumulate over time before God brings judgment on the scale of a Katrina or Gustav -- or the Babylonian Captivity or the end of the world.

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Later. Here's an article about the wider economic impact caused by these gigantic hurricanes. It includes a hint about another thing to repent of: after Katrina they reestablished casinos that God had seen fit to have wiped out the first time around. We don't learn.

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Later still. I was wondering where the interruption of the Republican convention fit into God's judgment. Well, it seems obvious to me now. The Republicans have been in charge of the nation for the last eight years. They did not seek God, they did not call for days of repentance. Pres Bush called Islam a "religion of peace" effectively befriending enemies of both God and our nation. He also hosted an ecumenical (i.e., idolatrous) prayer service after 9/11 in the National Cathedral, mixing God's enemies with Christians. It's not too late to repent though. Bush could still get alone with God and seek to understand these things and even yet call a time of repentance on behalf of the nation before he leaves office.

I can't imagine why God gave the Republicans Sarah Palin. We deserve the Marxist Obama or Hillary as punishment. Maybe there are still enough of us who seek His glory that He continues to have mercy on us.

Thank You, Lord, for Sarah Palin

American politics has become so ungodly in recent years there may be no justification for a Christian even to vote any more, since any vote, usually of necessity for the lesser of two evils, is usually a vote for something or someone one's Spirit-taught conscience can't fully endorse.

Do you let the worst prevail because you can't in all conscience even endorse the less bad? Do you abandon the world of politics altogether as "of this world" because Christians are supposed to be in the world but not of it? Or do Christians have an obligation to vote against the worst because of our calling to be salt and light to the world?

I've been debating all this with myself for a while now.

Now I want to report that John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for Vice President has unexpectedly inspired me. My first knowledge of her existence came with that very announcement and the speech she gave on the occasion.

She comes across as an articulate, tough-minded and honest patriotic American motivated not by the usual power politics but a genuine desire to serve the country, with a record of already having faced down corruption as governor of Alaska. She's also a Christian, as well as an idealistic and very real and likeable human being rather than a self-serving politician.

I didn't think it was possible to be inspired at all in this election, it's all looked so hopelessly mired in the politics of sin and self-indulgence and anti-patriotism that took off in the sixties with the Cultural Marxists. Then along comes this fresh face with an honest and godly agenda and the personality to be persuasive, and I'm nearly giddy with the hope that God isn't quite ready to throw us out with the trash.

I say this even as Hurricane Gustav is approaching along the same path as Katrina of three years ago, that destroyed so much of New Orleans, again threatening that city along with the vulnerable oil wells in the area. Gustav is expected to arrive about the time the Republican Convention is getting underway on Monday. There are many levels of God's judgment to be thought about here if it disrupts that event along with devastating the Gulf Coast, leaving displaced persons and destruction of property in its path, plus the consequent rising prices across the nation.

Time will tell, but I'm rooting for Sarah Palin and for the country. I'm even rooting for John McCain now. A man who could choose Sarah Palin deserves my vote. May God have mercy in the midst of judgment.

Oh if only the seminaries and pastors would read Dean Burgon's Revision Revised.

I wonder how the seminaries teach the Bible versions history, what books top their reading list for the course. Clearly it is taught in most seminaries in such a way as to recommend the modern versions. But how much do they teach of the other side?

There's an online site by a Michael Marlowe who calls himself The Bible Researcher, who is very informative on many things. He has some degree of seminary training as I recall. He was one of my sources for the understanding of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 as requiring women to cover our heads in church now as well as in Paul's day. But on the subject of the Bible versions he has capitulated to the establishment point of view. I was very disappointed to discover this. He dismisses Dean Burgon as simply overstating his case. He probably represents the majority of the scholarly Christian community.

I deeply wish that Dean Burgon's book were taught in the seminaries at great length. I think if the book were studied in the seminaries and also by pastors in the churches, before they set about teaching on the subject of the versions, it might well revolutionize things, it might well lead to a complete rethinking of the subject. Even if it didn't persuade all or even many, some honest souls would just have to recognize the superiority of his reasoning, his excellent knowledge, his thoroughly mustered evidence.

And he's SO funny too. His sarcasm in dismissing the ridiculous excuse for scholarship he finds in the work of Westcott and Hort is priceless. I still want to assemble some of the best quotes from him, especially in answer to James White, but I can't just toss it off, I'm going to have to work to put it together well. Meanwhile, I just had to say this much. Anyone who wants to read the book online will find it at David Cloud's site, and D A Waite's site sells it as well as hosting the Dean Burgon Society.

Lord, won't You have mercy on the church and open the eyes of many of her leaders on this subject among others?

KJOs need to be a LOT more careful than this!

Well, a Christian commentator whose talks on a variety of last-days issues I've appreciated pretty much for a few months now, despite some lapses, has gone over the edge this time. He's reading a text that would have us revere all the misspellings of the original KJV as God's own inspired word:

Believers Beware of Counterfeit King James Bibles.

Of course there were misspellings in the 1611 KJV -- it was one of the many sorts of errors, or was it merely inconsistent spellings -- corrected between then and the 1869Cambridge edition, misprints, typos, misspellings, inconsistent spellings and whatnot. Or if they were all merely inconsistent and not misspellings for that reason, what difference does it really make? (I'm answering someone who has taken me to task for this in the comments section).

On the list of words the writer thinks have been mistakenly altered in some new editions of the King James is the word "ought" which later editions have replaced with "aught." He INSISTS that "aught" is wrong. "Ought has been changed to aught," he complains, and in a Bible quote at the top of the page he emphasizes what he believes to be the correct spelling:

Deuteronomy 4:2 Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you. [his emphasis].

It takes someone ignorant of the English language to prefer this spelling in this place.

The reader of this tract on counterfeit King James Bibles also happened to recommend the 1828 Webster's Dictionary in this same talk, obviously unaware that Webster himself disagrees with his source about the spelling "ought:"

Webster's 1828 Dictionary:

OUGHT. See Aught, the true orthography.

AUGHT, n. ...
This word should not be written ought. [my emphasis]

1. Any thing, indefinitely. But go, my son, and see if aught be wanting.
2. Any part, the smallest; a jot or tittle.
There failed not aught of any good thing which the Lord had spoken. Josh. 21.

I didn't check all the words our anxious adviser listed to be held as pure and untouchable, but one I recall is the old spelling asswaged as opposed to assuaged, so I did check the Webster's 1828 again, and found:

Webster's 1828 Dictionary

ASSWA'GE, See Assuage.

Is the old Webster's the authority or not?

Another King James Bible purist on this subject accepts changes in spelling up to the 1869 Cambridge edition but is adamant that that edition is the zenith of perfection and equivalent to God-breathed scripture, in which no one should dare change one dot or semi-colon:

http://www.bibleprotector.com/

Really, if we have to accept typos and misspellings and inconsistent spellings and archaic terminology as the ordained perfect word of God not to be tampered with we'll drive ourselves stark raving bonkers. We have to leave SOME room for human error and natural change over time in this enterprise. The first English Bibles were not perfect. This is acknowledged by all. Yet they were God's word nevertheless. It is only the King James that has been decreed perfection. The King James translators themselves do not seem to have held this opinion of their work; I have to agree with James White about that much. They assured their readers that they had only the intention of making a good translation better. According to the judgment of the next two and a half centuries they succeeded admirably. Nevertheless that 1611 translation underwent a number of editions with corrections and changes (by whom I'm not clear). And still, by the mid-19th century there were apparently reasonable voices raised -- I suppose they were reasonable -- Dean Burgon seems eminently reasonable -- advocating some further minor changes in the Authorized Version, which eventually led to the convening of the Convocation of the Southern Province of the Church of England for this purpose. Had they done what they were charged to do, we'd have a slightly different King James Bible now that had the status of THE Authorized Version, and we would not have the hundreds of other versions. But this gathering of scholars issued after many years in The New Greek Text produced by Westcott and Hort, by the best opinion (in my opinion) a desecration of the word of God, yet it is now the foundation of the vast majority of the Bibles in the English-speaking world, and even beyond as they are also the basis for translations into other languages.

I have not seen any opinion from that time that the King James was perfect exactly as is. I may be wrong but I haven't yet seen it. That opinion seems to have sprung up in the 20th century. Correct me if I'm wrong please. [8/28: I recall that the Northern branch of the Anglican church refused to be involved in revising the Authorized Version. I suppose it might be possible to find some statements from them].

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The commentator whose reading of the Bible Counterfeits page at the Biblebelievers site I'm commenting on also seemed to be saying that any use of the lower case "s" when referring to the Spirit or spirit of God shows tampering with the text. The page he read does not say that, but he seemed to be saying that. In answer to him it has to be pointed out that the original 1611 King James has it that way, and all the Bibles since then have it both ways but unfortunately all do not agree on which should be where. I do not know whether the 1611's choices are acceptable to those who object to the misuse or not:

Ge 1:2 And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darkenesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters.
Ge 6:3 And the LORD said, My Spirit shall not alwayes striue with man; for that hee also is flesh: yet his dayes shalbe an hundred and twenty yeeres.
Ge 41:38 And Pharaoh said vnto his seruants, Can we find such a one, as this is, a man in whom the spirit of God is?

The point is that he is wrong if he thinks ANY use of the lower-case "s" is a case of "leaven" (the introduction of false teaching among the words of truth)! Comparing the original with the current KJV on my Swordsearcher Bible program I do see that the usage is not the same between them. But the point is that lower case "s" is sometimes correct. It depends on the context which should be lower case and which upper case, so you have to understand the reasoning for each choice. I'm not up on this, except that some of them are clearly referring to the Holy Spirit of the Trinity and others are referring to God's spirit in something like the sense of the human spirit, the spirit of God Himself. But again, the point is that there ARE valid uses of the lower case "s" in relation to God. Bible Protector explains this somewhere. This is really an issue for the experts. This guy at biblebelievers who wrote the text is setting himself up as the judge of things he doesn't know enough about!

And double please! BRITISH SPELLINGS are not God-ordained over American spellings! "Saviour" is no more God-ordained than "Savior!"

No, no, no! This is myopia and superstition!

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I agree that too many Bibles are changed by publishers who have no business doing it. But that doesn't mean that some changes are not needed from time to time, only that the right people should be doing them. It should be a very serious undertaking done by true Bible-believing experts, scholars in the relevant language, appointed by some body of church authorities who share the same basic theology. Changes were made to many editions of the 1611 up to the time of the 1869 Cambridge. Who made them? Why do we accept them but not later ones? This is a serious question. Who is it that decreed that Check List on Biblebeliever's site and why should I trust THEM?

(I have had to rewrite this post a few times before getting it more or less clear. I hope I have finally succeeded. Sorry if I have confused all one and a half persons who might have visited during the reconstruction process.)

Taking a punch to the gut from the modern Bible versions defenders

Well, now I've ventured into the camp of the new versions defenders and find Burgon dismissed as overstating his case (I have to agree he probably does that, at least he seems to enjoy dramatizing it, but his case is solid without it), and Scrivener brushed off as simply one of the conservatives, and so on, while they respect the reply to Burgon by one Bishop Ellicott (which in my opinion Burgon demolished beyond recovery), and treat Westcott and Hort as respectable contributors to the history of Bible translation.

They don't condemn the fact that W&H completely disobeyed their assignment to MINIMALLY revise the Authorized Version / King James. Shouldn't the character of the revisers matter?

Have they compared the attitude of the AV (King James) translators which demonstrates their reverence and fear of God with the attitude of W&H who sound like regular secular academics?

Do they care that W&H expressed the typical rationalistic doubts of their time about the supernatural elements of the Christian revelation?

They don't seem to be bothered much that there were eminent scholars of the time who considered the texts used by W&H to be corrupted and in fact known to and dismissed by the King James translators. No, they just wave this away: Oh it's not all that bad.

It doesn't seem to bother them that W&H not only used a whole other set of corrupted texts, but also changed thousands upon thousands of words in the English, most of them tiny little changes without any justification whatever, which Bishop Wordsworth described as "change for change's sake." This is something I discovered for myself in this blog when I looked at the various versions of Psalm 91. (How ironic that White opens his book with a sanctimonious little sermon against change for change's sake when if you do any comparisons at all you have to see that that kind of change is HUGE in the new versions).

And it doesn't bother them that Christians can't quote the Bible to each other without having to stumble over different terminology and sometimes not even be able to recognize the passage being quoted.

And it doesn't bother them that ordinary Christians, including Christian pastors, are burdened with the job of translation and textual criticism as part of their normal Bible study without the slightest expertise. We're just supposed to expect this extra work as part of our commitment to Christ (James White says something like this). I see nowhere that all Christians are expected to be Bible translators and critics, far from it, we are told to conform ourselves to the image of Christ, period. We should be able to trust that God has provided us those gifted to take care of such responsibilities for us. It appears that the last time He did so was with the King James translation.

Something went very very wrong in this Bible revision enterprise. Surely it has a lot to do with the influence of rationalism that had already corrupted the church of England by that time. It must also have a lot to do with the habits of intellectual work, which can easily pollute the spiritual life if not diligently brought into submission to Christ. Yeah, when they sound like academics instead of Christians, something's wrong. And many seminary trained pastors sound like that too.

Quite the towering multiply-interlocking snare the devil has built on this one. The smooth condescending tone by Christians in praise of the revisers and their coup against the church, plus the stubborn superstitiousness and intemperate revilings by the Christians who take the KJO position out to nevernever land, seal the deal.

Well, the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds. However, if this is judgment against the church, the only thing that will work is Christians waking up and repenting.

I'm finding this awfully exhausting and discouraging right now. But I'm going to keep slogging through White.