Sola5 Wednesday Recap - 8/13/08

This weekly topic is an effort to recap the Wednesday night Bible study I teach at Sola5, my youth group. I hope it serves to help us all in contemplating the ceaseless riches of God’s grace as revealed through the Scriptures.

Last night, while we continued our summer Q&A series, "You Asked For It," we did things a little differently because of the nature of the question we examined. One of my students asked, "How can we trust the Bible to be completely true if it's been copied over thousands of years?" This is an incredibly important question for us, since the truth and trustworthiness of the Bible is a fundamental presupposition to everything we do at Sola5. So, rather than our usual expository lesson from the Scriptures, we examined the Bible itself, and why we can trust the process that takes truth from God's mouth to our ears.

We spent the first half of the lesson talking about the inspiration of Scripture by examining what the Bible claims about itself. The answer? The Scriptures claim God as their ultimate author, claim to be sufficient for us to know and worship God, and claim to be completely and totally true and trustworthy. We continued by looking at the process of transmission, and why we can trust that the inerrant original documents of the Bible have been faithfully preserved all the way down to us today. Obviously, the lesson was quite a bit more technical than a lot of our normal Wednesday night study. Rather than reproducing it in great detail, I'm going to direct you to a fantastic resource that I relied on heavily in preparing the lesson last night - a paper by Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll. The paper was written by Driscoll to his church explaining his decision to preach from the English Standard Version (ESV), but it also contains some great explanatory material on the process of inspiration and transmission as well. It's a much better summary of our study last night then I could ever hope to write, so I commend it to you.