Tag: trust

Daily Psalms – Psalm 20

by Matthew Stidham, posted in Psalms, Scripture

Daily Psalm Reading – Psalm 16-20

(Sunday’s are hard. It’s very tiring on those of us who preach regularly. Saturday nights offer little sleep as God shapes our sermons in our heads. We awake early Sunday and arrive early to pray and seek the voice and wisdom of God. We pour ourselves out and then come home and crash, only to do it all over again. All this to say the tank is pretty empty on Sundays, so don’t expect this to be an overly deep, or lengthy reflection today.)

Today we meditate on Psalm 20 and the promised Messiah. Psalm 20 – 23 focus on David’s seed (the Messiah, Jesus) and his deliverance and rule over the nations. Here we encounter psalms of prophecy that tell us about Jesus.

Verse 6 states: “Now this I know: The LORD gives victory to his anointed.” The Hebrew word for anointed is “messiah.” No matter how upside down this world seems, no matter how chaotic and out of control, victory will be given to our Messiah Jesus!

After the first 5 verses of prayer and blessing over the coming (returning) Messiah, verses 6-9 point us to what the Messiah will do and where we should put our trust. The admonition to not trust in earthly power, but in the name of Yahweh our God is one we need to hear today. In a time where most pray “Our god which art in Washington…” we need to remember our help comes from Yahweh!

I’ll confess it is a struggle not to trust in our own strength. As the psalmist says we want to “trust in chariots and…horses.” The idea of picking ourselves up by our bootstraps isn’t a Biblical one. Rather we are encouraged time and time again to rely on our God, not our own abilities. Trusting in anything other than our God results in failure (v.8).

Today I pray we all learn to trust our God, to believe that our Messiah has been given victory over evil, and will return soon to eliminate it completely. Come Lord Jesus!

To echo the final words of the psalm, “Yahweh, give victory to King Jesus! Answer our prayers!” Shalom.

CLICK HERE TO READ TODAY’s DAILY PSALM READING – PSALM 16-20

Can We Trust The Bible?

by Matthew Stidham, posted in History of the Bible, Uncategorized

When I was little I remember my grandmother teaching my cousins and me a game called “Telephone.” Someone comes up with a sentence and whispers it into the ear of the person next to them. This continues being passed through several silly, giggling child-interpreters until it reaches the original person. Everyone gets a huge laugh because what started as “The gray goose flies at night,” turns into “My granny has an overbite.”

Tweet: People struggle with the Bible because they believe it was passed down like a game of Telephone. The truth is far more stunning!

“The Bible can’t be trusted. It was copied by hand so many times that it must be full of mistakes. After thousands of years of errors we simply can’t trust what’s there!” The problem with this argument is the assumption that the Bible was copied much like you or I would scribble notes during a lecture, which is simply untrue.

Ancient scribes dedicated their lives to copying the Bible by hand, letter for letter, word for word, line for line. And this is very important to understand. Men who dedicated themselves to this artform had the scriptures memorized, as well as having a multitude of very early copies from which to work. Over 24,000 of these ancient copies remain from the New Testament alone, far more than any other writing of its age!

The scribes worked meticulously copying each and every detail of the text. It was then checked for accuracy by line. The chief scribes (who had the text memorized) knew exactly how many letters and words should be in each line of text for a particular book. If the copy in question didn’t match up, it was not corrected…it was destroyed. They held the text in such high esteem that they would rather destroy an expensive parchment and throw away the work rather than have one mistake come through their work.

That being said, not every scribe worked so perfectly. We do have “textual variants” within the scriptures. Most of these are sequence variations. In the book The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, Dr. Bruce Metzger describes it this way. “…it makes a whale of a difference in English if you say ‘Dog bites man’ or ‘Man bites dog’ – sequence matters in English. But in Greek it doesn’t.” Greek is an inflected language, and no matter what order you place the words, the meaning still comes across the same. The meaning isn’t changed in the slightest, but this counts as a textual variant. And if 10 copies of this same variant exist, then scholars count that as 10 textual variants even though they are the same variant (confusing, I know.)

Can the Bible be trusted? Strobel quotes scholars Norman Geisler and William Nix’s conclusion: “The New Testament, then, has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but it has survived in a purer form than any other great book-a form that is 99.5 percent pure.”

God has preserved His word for us in a fully trustworthy form. All we have to do now is read it!

Want to know more about the Bible? Try these other posts:
The Problem with The Bible
Where Do I Start? – Part 1
Where Do I Start? – Part 2