Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
I see. Well once again, here's your statement verbatim:
"Even the errors are divinely inspired. Just like Judas's betrayal of Christ. God can inspire human mistakes for His purpose."
So, to try to paraphrase, once again, first you're saying that mistakes in the Biblical text were God-breathed. Is that right? Second, you're saying that Judas's betrayal of Christ, not merely the account of it in the Bible, was God-breathed. Correct? Third, you're saying that the God-breathed errors in the Bible are the same as the God-breathed crime of Judas. Do I have that right?
|
I'm confused by your analysis. I will write again what I meant:
We can trust the original text is without error because...
If there are any errors in the original text, they were there by God's sovereign will.
Just because a human makes a mistake (like Judas), does not mean that mistake is outside of God's will. Mistakes do not mean we cannot trust the original manuscripts.
Now at this point someone might wonder - did God cause Judas to betray Christ and Judas was "doing God's will". Well no, I don't subscribe to that gnostic idea.
What I believe is that Judas made a mistake (and God knew he would make a mistake) and God used that mistake for His purpose. Similarly, God knew if the apostle Paul would make a mistake in the original text, and God would use that for His purpose, somehow.
So any mistakes by the apostle Paul or Moses, God will use for His purpose.
An example of mistakes I can give is about science. It has mistakes about science, for example, such as the Egyptian cosmology, but that's okay because God used Moses's Egyptian view of science for His purpose - to explain to Job how He created the Earth, for example. For us today, it makes nice poetry, God hammering out the bronze dome of the Earth and putting pillars underneath it so it cannot be moved. The reality is the Earth moves and wobbles all over the place. Moses would fail a science test at school today.
Egyptian cosmology in the bible is an example of an "inspired error" but because of confusion around that terminology ("does God inspire errors?"), I prefer to say - "errors by a fallible human who was inspired".
Moses was inspired, He communicated the truths that God wanted Him to communicate accurately and without error, but he also communicated errors about science, to him they were not mistakes but the best of his knowledge at the time, to us they are errors.