Christ’s Words Shall Never Pass Away (3)

Christ’s words, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Matt. 24:35), are a divine promise of the preservation of the entire Scriptures up to (and beyond) Christ’s second coming. This text leads us to believe that God has providentially maintained His Word for over 3,000 years and will continue to do so. The Westminster Confession states that the OT in Hebrew and the NT in Greek "being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical" (1.8).

God’s special preservation of the Scriptures is denied or ignored by many. Liberal Protestants don’t see God’s sovereign hand much in the world at all, never mind in His singular care for His Word. Muslims tell us that the Bible is hopelessly corrupted and so cannot be trusted. Most textual critics labor without a living sense of God’s special providential preservation of His inspired Word.

It is true that we do not have the original manuscripts written by holy men of God as they were moved by the Holy Ghost (II Peter 1:21). And in the thousands of copies that we have, there are transmissional errors. However, from these manuscripts, the correct reading can be and is seen.

God used the Jews as the librarians of the OT for the church, as Augustine said. The OT priesthood was commanded to care for the law (Deut. 31:9f.). When Ezra returned from the Babylonian captivity, he probably brought with him the inspired oracles written up to that point. Philo, an Alexandrian Jew and a contemporary of the apostles, said that the Jews would rather die a thousand times than see one word of the Scriptures altered. It was a common Jewish saying that to alter one letter of the law is no less a sin than to set the whole world on fire. The Massoretes, Jewish scribes who labored in the second half of the first millennium after Christ, had a great respect for the written Word. They counted the number of verses in each book and identified the middle verse. They numbered the occurrences of each Hebrew letter in every book and in the whole OT. For example, the letter Aleph occurs 42,377 times and Beth 38,218 times. In 1947 when the Qumran scrolls were found in some caves west of the Dead Sea, unbelieving scholars hoped to see vast differences between these Hebrew manuscripts written before Christ and the later manuscripts used by the church. Much to their chagrin, the Dead Sea Scrolls agreed with our Hebrew manuscripts remarkably. These are just some pointers showing how God has kept the OT pure by "his singular care and providence" (W.C. 1.8) so that His Word shall never pass away (Matt. 24:35).