Guided by what God did say

Guided by What God Did Say
God gave Adam the gift of language. "Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name." Genesis 2:19-20. If Hebrew was the original language as some think, Adam would have said: "That looks like a parah (cow). This looks like a kelev (dog)."

God communicated with Adam in words. "I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself." Genesis 3:10.

The Bible speaks the message of God in words. Language was confused at Babel (Genesis 11:6-9). "Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." But at Pentecost, through the power of The Spirit, "...we hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God" (Acts 2:5-12).


1. Campbell said we believe Moses insofar as he spoke to us. Moses wrote to the people then living in the language they spoke and understood (Hebrew). But Moses also looked down the stream of time to Christ Jesus. "For Moses truly said to the fathers, 'The LORD your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren. Him you shall hear in all things, whatever He says to you'" (Acts 3:22; Deuteronomy 18:15,18,19).


2. Some things spoken are hard to understand. "as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which those who are untaught and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the rest of the Scriptures" (2 Peter 3:16).

a) When Paul says faith and James says works and John says love - they are all saying the same thing and do not contradict one another.

b) Jesus said radical things. The scribes and Pharisees were spiritually blind & deaf. He spoke in vehement language to try to reach them. Read the context and compare.

"And if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you."

"and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake."

"Enter in at the strait gate . . few there be that find it."

But: "And I say to you that many will come from east and west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into outer darkness" (Matt. 8:11-12).

c) Peter said: "The righteous are scarcely saved." But he also said: "for so an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 1:11).

d) Paul warned: "not to strive about words to no profit, to the ruin of the hearers" (2 Timothy 2:14; Titus 3:9). Barnes wrote: "He then exhorts Timothy to study to perform his duties in such a way that he would not be ashamed, and to avoid the unimportant strifes which were then raging; and to enforce this, he refers to a real case with which Timothy was acquainted-- that of Hymeneus and Philetus, who, by unprofitable speculations, had been led to deny a fundamental doctrine of religion. Yet, Paul says, he should not be discouraged because some had been led into dangerous errors. The foundation of God remained firm." 2 Timothy 2:19

Campbell wrote in 1826: "We have, in writing, all the Hebrew and Greek that is necessary to perpetuate to the end of time, all the ideas which the Spirit of God has communicated to the world; and these languages, being dead, have long since ceased to change. The meaning of the words used by the sacred penman, is fixed and immutable; which it could not have been, had these languages continued to have been spoken." [Note: modern Hebrew and modern Greek are not the same as the ancient languages.]

Lienhard wrote: "For the earliest Christians, who were Jews, the Sacred Scriptures (O.T.) were the fixed authority, and they were used to demonstrate that Jesus was Messiah and Lord." Compare Paul in Acts 13:13-41. "Now when they had fulfilled all that was written concerning Him, they took Him down from the tree and laid Him in a tomb. But God raised Him from the dead."