Mending Broken Relationships | Matthew 5:21-26

You're listening to the Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun, in practical ways. Hey, everybody, Wow, you remember you sound excited? You remember Robin Williams Good Morning Vietnam. Yeah, yeah, that's I don't know why, but that's what I was thinking of it. That's only that movie's only like one hundred years old. It really is. Anybody older than me, we'll remember that. Actually, it wasn't even that popular a movie. Was it A Good Morning Vietnam? Yeah, it probably was. I think it was nominated. It wasn't it. I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. I don't know that anybody cares. Nobody cares, nobody. But we know what we do care about, Jeff, what the Bible? We do? Big fan? Yes, I'm a big fan of the both in fun and practical ways. And so we're in the middle of a series talking about the Beatitudes. But before we get into that, we have a segment that Desiree has asked us to do, called something the pastor. Yeah this is a man we're starting the week off? Is that gonna be like the new way to introduce it? Both of you and I, both you and I go. Stump the pastor is that what we should do? I don't know. Maybe it says this. We know the Bible was written thousands of years ago in different languages and has been has been translated into many other languages and versions over time. With each language and version translation, how much of the original meaning may have been lost, altered, or omitted from the original text. We forgot to say. This is from Andrea C. Hi. Andrea, Hi, Andrea, Yeah, great question. Great question. Yes, this is at the foundation of critical theory, which is designed primarily to disassemble people's belief in the Bible. And it's a sub sub story on most like History Channel or Discovery Channel things about the Bible. Yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff. Is this question? Oh, it's been translated so many times, it was hand copied so many times, there's probably a bunch missing. Or the other side of it is there's usually a hint that there was some kind of collusion to decide, Man, we're going to keep out. The bad stuff. We're just gonna put in stuff that gives us more control. Right, So that's that's the other side of that. So, uh, what what do you have to say for her. Well, I would say I would say a couple of things. Number one, even though I don't have the statistics in front of me, what I do remember reading is like, in terms of the accuracy of the Bible, Uh, nobody questions you know, uh, the Iliad, right, yeah, And there's like there's like a hundred copies of Iliod or something like this, and there are thousands upon thousands of copies of the ancient manuscripts of the scriptures, and each one of them is painstakingly uh you know, walked through by thousands of people over the years before translation is made complete. So I have a couple yeah, oh wow, how about that? Yeah, you went and grab that so so in I think if you you know, we're going to give you just kind of off the top of our head answers Andrea. And that's great. But if you're the kind of person who likes to dig in and read some stuff, sure, I think maybe one of the most approachable, easy to understand books that deals with this would be a book by Josh and Sean McDowell, father and son, and it's called The Unshakable Truth, and it says how you can experience the twelve Essentials of Relevant Faith, and one of the segments is on can you Trust the Bible? And it's phenomenal, So on a casual reading level, this is a great one to do. And then they have tons and tons and tons of and notes and all that kind of stuff that you can go and I have and follow up on. I have put this graphic or reversion of it on the screen before. Oh good, yeah, yeah yeah. And then the other one that I would recommend is From God to Us How We Got Our Bible by Norm Geisler and William Nix. This is going to be way more academic, but if you want to dig into the academic side, wow, right, So they're both fantastic. Anyways, along the lines, you talk about the Homer's Iliad in the Odyssey. It was written eight hundred BC. The earliest copies we have were from four hundred BC. There's four hundred of four hundred year gap and it's six hundred and forty three years copies, right, and so there's six hundred and forty three copies. We have a pretty good sense that, hey, we can trust that Homer actually wrote that book in that it's pretty authentic. When you get into some of the others. Herodotus's history, there's a thirteen hundred and fifty year gap between when he wrote it and the earliest copy we have. There's only eight left. We don't argue Herodotus's history about you know, Rome Plato. Plato's books particularly, probably you talk about the Republic. There's a thirteen hundred year gap between when he wrote it in four hundred BC and the very first copy we have in nine hundred eighty, and there's only seven copies. But I don't remember a lot of people fighting over Plato's Republic, Right, I've got a copy of that. In my office. Right. Demosthenes, same thing, his writings, there's only two hundred copies, and there's a fourteen hundred year gap. Caesar, Julius, Caesar, the Gaelic Wars. Nobody argues that there's a thousand year gap between when he wrote it and when we have the first copy, and there's only ten copies, Right, Yeah, isn't that crazy? Tacitus, same thing, But when you get to it, there's fifty eight hundred copies of the New Testament. The earliest is within fifty years of a gap of the Book of John right, is a fifty year gap. You have the rest of the New Testament, there's fifty six hundred copies, fifty eight hundred. Now there's nineteen thousand plus translated copies within a three hundred year window. But we've got copies of Mark, and we have copies of John that are within fifty years of when they were written, and literally thousands and thousands and thousands of copies. So the relevance of it's an overwhelming evidence with regard to the amount of copies we have, So keep going yep. And then I was going to say, there's textual accuracy when you translate into another language, right, are we translate it best? You know, the earliest Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic texts. There's linguistic accuracy does the translation convey with the words in the grammar actually mean? And then there's conceptual theological accuracy, which is does this preserve the author's intent without adding or removing doctrine? Right? And so basically the the translations have to be you know, first of all, they have linguists who are you know, hundreds of linguists who usually gather for a single translation copy of brand new copy. And then also theologians from different denominations who check the translations, and then there are people who speak the languages who actually back translate them. So once it's translated, then what they do is they translate it back into Greek to make sure that it actually makes sense the other way. And so there are people who basically are going to make sure that it's not just text to word, you know, word for word translation. They want to make sure that it actually translates into the meaning of that language. Yeah, because you know it's basically fought and intent and meaning. Sometimes it needs to be checked over just word for word accurate translation. So her question is because it was hand copied so much and there's been so many copies of it, the imagination would be in what some professors would want to argue is it's like a game of telephone, right right? If I tell you, if I whisper something to you and you whisper something to Dez and does risp something to Christy Christy, then all of a sudden, by the time it gets seven, eight, nine, ten levels deep, it's not going to be anything. And we've all played that game before. Yeah, the only problem is it doesn't go back to the original source. Every time, right, So that's what we're what the what the implication is usually when people are worried about that is that maybe it got degraded over time. So let's go to the beginning when they began to copy the Bible, from the very beginning, when when the first when when Moses's people began, you know, when he wrote, and then the people began copying. The scribes became a very significant class of people within Israel. They were highly educated people, and the job was because back then you didn't have preservation techniques like we do now. So they're writing on papyrus, or they're writing on some faulty kind of you know, not a long term paper, or they're writing on vellum, which would be like animal skin, and so they knew that it wasn't gonna last a long time. So the answer to the fact that every copy is not going to last a long time was to have an overwhelming number of copies. So they had an entire class of people, not just a couple of scribes. There would be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of highly compensated, highly educated, highly skilled scribes copying the Bible. Right, yes, and then the reverence of it was so high that if you may made more than a mistake or two, you could lose your job. They would take it such as a holy thing that when they came to the name of God Yahweh, they would get rid of their old pen. They would wash their hands, and they would use a brand new pen only to write God's name. Then they would discard that pen and pick up another pin and keep going because it's so holy. And then you and I, if we were both scribes and we were copying the same page, we were not allowed to copy by memory. That's why. So we wouldn't keep copying the same pages over and over again. So we had to copy eye to paper. Eye to paper, I'd look at God blesses those God blesses those who are poor, who are poor, right, and we'd write it down that word for word. I wasn't allowed to write from memory. And then every page was laid out exactly the same way, so that our supervisor had the exact number of letters that were on the page and then the exact middle letter. Knew what that would be, right, so then he would test us, and then all of our work would be sent to a new group of supervisors supervising our supervisor, and our supervisor could lose his job if he passed our pages that had a letter wrong, not words or ideas. So on occasion, throughout history there have been a few alterations. There's been things that have changed, minor things, sometimes errors. On occasion you'll find a scribe who will write a note in the corner or whatever of a page, but there are no theological things. It's ninety nine points something percent consistent throughout. All of the copies. And we would struggle with believing that, like, is that true, because historians were saying that, you know, in the early nineteen hundreds that it appears that it's ninety nine percent accurate across all the different things. And then remember God preserved all those languages, so all those languages are dead. That version of Hebrew, that version of Greek, that version of Arabic, it's not exactly spoken that way anymore. So we know exactly what it means. English is a living language. Like the word gay today doesn't mean what gay meant back when they were singing it in White Christmas right right, We're happy and gay. They didn't mean it back then the way that we mean it now because we live in the English. Our English language is a living language, is what keeps changing. But after the New Testament was written, coin a Greek died, nobody speaks it anymore. After the Old Testament was done written being written, that version of Hebrew is died. It's no longer spoken anymore. The other portions that were written in Aramaic in Jesus Day, that version of Arabic is dead. Nobody speaks it anymore, so it cannot change. We know exactly what it meant, right, which is super cool. So the ideas have not changed. And then the copying was nearly perfect. It wasn't absolutely perfect, but as perfect as humans can make it. And then we were overwhelmed with the evidence of all different manuscripts compared to any other ancient document, It's unbelievable. It's tens of thousands of pieces, over fifty eight hundred copies of the New Testament, right, so nearly perfectly done. So then when you measure that extra tiny one percent, there's not a single theological thing that Christians believe that is altered at all. It's often the spelling of a name os versus iOS at the end of their name or something like that. It's sometimes it's a grammar thing where you'd put their version of a comma or something like that. And so those things combined, God controlled it in a way that made it very, very difficult to have perverted the thing. So then the question would be, well, then was there some kind of conspiracy to make sure some things were kept in and other things were kicked out? So there'd be some giant conspiracy. And all I would say is, have you ever been in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in. Jerusalem? Jerusalem? Okay, so churchill Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Nobody actually runs that church. It's seven denominations that run it. And it's because there's all these people who claim it. Nobody can actually claim all of it, and they can't get along. So you would think this is one of the most holy places in Christendom. And when you're in there, doesn't it just seem like it perpetually needs maintenance? Right, it's dirty, it's overrun. It's because the just these seven patriarchs cannot agree, so they can't move a chair without unanimous honestly, they can't. Yeah, there's a ladder that has not been moved even though it doesn't go anywhere. Yeah, it's like fifty years or something. Yeah, Yeah, they cannot agree. So God has even used the frailty of humanity not being Christians, not being able to get along right to set to be able to preserve the fact that we could not come to some kind of super conclusion for a conspiracy with leaders from Morocco and Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt and Syria and Jerusalem and Iraq and Greece and Turkey and Rome and Spain. You know, when they would bring. Those groups together, they could not agree on anything other than Jesus is the Son of God and salvation is by grace to your faith. They could not agree. So the idea that they could come up with some kind of conclusion to have a conspiracy to eliminate things that weren't included or weren't part of the Bible, it's pretty absurd when they can't even decide to move a ladder in the most holy church on the planet. Right. And then also I would just add to all of that that there's also a faith component. Ye sure, So what the Word of God says about right, So it says it's biblically accurate. It says it's the words of God. Even even the piecing together of the Word. Either you believe that God had his hand upon that, or you don't, right because God himself, you know, or the Word actually talks about itself in that way. These aren't the words of authors that these are the words of God and how God pieced it together. So so there's a faith component that says, hey, I'm going to believe that. You know, if God wanted to piece together his Holy Word for his people, he was going to have his hand upon that. So in other words, you know, he's going to just like you said, use us even in our you know, mistakes to do that. But but God is also going to make sure that no mistake does happen. You know, He's not going to allow that, right, right, it's his Holy Word to his people, Which means there's a faith component that says, if I believe and trust God and what God's Word says about itself, I believe that the meaning and the translations are also preserved, and. Then you can have confidence. And as we wrap up, because we took a long time to answer this question, but I think it's fundamental to your ability to be a student of the Bible. You can have confidence that the book you hold in your hands, the modern translation, the ancient versions are the word of God. They don't just contain words from God. This is the complete, infallible, authoritative word of. God to you. That's right. There's no other book ever that has had the accuracy or the clarity or the preservation nearly to perfection that this book has. And you can be sure when you read these words that God is speaking through those words to you. I agree, right, it doesn't just contain the word of God. It is the word of God. And you know, anybody who doubts the validity of the Bible, Jeff gets. Me angry, Oh do they? Well then Chris, listen, you wouldn't like me when I'm angry? Do you turn into incredible home? Yeah, that's right, that's Bill vicksv line. So anyway, but hey, today you. Only did that because this is a transition. Yes, yea yea yeah yeah yeah yeah. Well today we're talking about anger. That's my transition. Yes, So Jesus is talking about anger. And it's okay that we spent so much time on the stunf the pastor question, because honestly, this is going to be a pretty quick read today. Yeah, well, grab a copy of The Unshakable Truth by the McDowell's Josh and Sean McDowell or From God to Us by Norm Geisler, and I think that they'll really begin down that path for you. I think it'd be great. But here's what it says. We're building our entire conversation over the last several weeks over the beatitudes, the first promises of God's blessings at the very beginning of jesus Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five, six and seven. And today we're still talking about God blesses those who work for peace. Last week we talked about the fact that you know, any piece of any part of paradise you want, you have to cultivate it and work at it. And peace is one of those things. You have to work at peace. God's blessed it. Not if somebody wants peace, you have to work at it. And he says for they will be called the children of God. So today the premise would be that he introduces these things that God blesses at the beginning of the message, and then throughout the message he gives you all these little caveats, little ideas that supplement or support these statements. And so in Matthew five twenty one through twenty six, Jesus says, you've heard that our ancestors were told you must not murder. If you commit murder, you're subject to judgment. But I say, if you're even angry with someone, you are a subject to judgment. If you call someone an idiot, you're in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you're in danger of the fires of hell. So if you're presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar, and go and be reconciled to that person, and then come and offer your sacrifice to God. When you're on your way to court with your adversary, settle your differences quickly. Otherwise, your accused you may hand you over to the judge, who will hand you over to the officer, and you'll be thrown into pricer And if that happens, you surely won't be free again until you've paid the last penny. So he's talking here we've read this passage before in this conversation of the Beatitudes, but here today, what we're really highlighting is this idea that if you're presenting a sacrifice at the altar and suddenly you remember someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice and go and be reconciled. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's a definite, clear statement that Jesus is saying that your anger towards someone affects your relationship with your heavenly father. That's right. And so it's amazing how when God tries to, you know, give us commands like hey, forgive somebody, we recognize that we're the beneficiary of that command. So and that's probably the biggest revelation for all forgiveness. If you came to Heritage Church during Christmas time, you probably saw Sonia Moletta story on video. It's very powerful and it was very powerful. And Sonia said, I went into prison and forgive my father. He was in there for murder and he had he had abused the family and things for years and years, and so she goes into prison to forgive him, and actually she ends up leading him to Christ on his deathbed, which is incredible. But anyway, She goes in there and says, I didn't realize I'm going into prison to forgive my father, only to discover I'm the prisoner. And she's because she struggled to forgive. Yeah, and she said I was the one that was captive. So it's it's an amazing thing. How you know when Jesus says, you know, come to me who you are. You know, you who are weary and heavy, have heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. You know he's he's saying, this is for your benefit. Give them to me. Drop your unforgiveness, get rid of your anger, you know, the malice, the bitterness. It's it's only going to harm you. And even though that, you feel like you're giving a gift to those who you're angry about, you know, are angry at right, you feel like you are benefiting them. Jesus is saying, it's benefiting you, including your relationship with your heaveny father. And how do we know that to be true? We know it to be true. Well, first of all because that's what he said, But secondly, because he said, if someone has something against you, right, He doesn't say if you have something against someone right? Does that be different, yes, because because that means you're a fault. But what he's saying is if they're if they're the ones with the problem and it doesn't even bother you go and make it right because it's that important. So again, the responsibility of right relationships falls on both sides of the equation right, we're not let off the hook on either side. There's you know, lots of ways to learn a thing. One of them one way that I think is very effective as contrasts. So here he says, God blesses us who work for peace. In in verse twenty one, he says, if you harbor anger, judgments coming. So there's blessment, blessing or judgment based on are you working for peace or are you cultivating your anger? And so then that sounds scary because man, I've lost my temper before, I've gotten angry before. Does that mean I'm going to judgment? Yeah, I know you've never seen it heavy Chris, Actually. No, not towards you. But so the idea that I was trying to get across their Man, I just lost my thoughts. So the idea is this anger is not. A sin. As a matter of fact, the Bible says, be angry and sin not right. Jesus was angry. He walked in, got mad, flipped over all the tables in the temple when they were ripping people off. A bunch of people were running these scam businesses inside the temple, taking advantage of people that have to make sacrifices. And they're overcharging and inflating prices and ripping people off and making a mockery of God and of God's religion and all that kind of stuff. And Jesus comes in and he just flips every table. He makes a whip, and think about this. One guy comes in one It wasn't Jesus in all disciples, it was just Jesus. And these people have. Been in better. You've been in these markets in the Middle East. For tens of thousands of people. Yes, and these markets are stall after stall after stall after stall, just piled up. These guys. Sometimes the salesman can be a little intimidating. They're aggressive, Yeah, they're very aggressive. One guy makes. A whip on his own enough, he took enough time to think about it while he's making his whip, and then he begins flipping tables, kind of losing it in the temple flipping, and nobody dared to confront him in that moment. You want to know how angry he was. It wasn't like, oh, guys, would you please, this is hurting my feelings. That's not what he was doing. This is a professional construction worker with probably popeye sized arms, going dude, this isn't right now, I'm going to do something about just flip them all, and nobody stops him. They're afraid of me in that moment. So it's possible to be angry about injustice and sin and wrong things. And not sin. So we call that a righteous anger. Righteous anger, Yeah, that's right, and it's yeah. It's completely acceptable to be upset over sin and injustice and the things. Yeah. As opposed to this is grudge holding anger. This is plotting anger, right, You know that anger where you're just mad at somebody and every time you have a quiet moment, you go back and you think about. How much you hate that person. How dare they say? You know what? You know what I'm gonna do? And you start plotting against that person and planning against that person. And that's this. This is that long term. It's not spur of the moment. I'm mad about a situation. It's I'm plotting against this person and it's ruining your life. Andy Stanley says, he knows he's angry at somebody when he starts to have imaginary conversations with them. He goes, and usually in his imagination it's him chewing them out in front of a large group of people that are. Going and I'm so clever and I'm so smart now and I proved you wrong here and I proved you right. That's right, that's right, that's really so hey, we're getting about that time because we again took a long time on stuff. You have a choice. You have a choice between between blessing actively working for peace, even when you know that they're offended by you, you go to them, he says, or you can choose to keep harboring this ongoing resentment and anger, and eventually it's going to be the opposite. He's choosing between life and death, between blessing and cursing. And this is the choice he's giving us here. And going to them and making it right is working for peace. That's right, which connects with our beatitude. That's right, so hey, that's great, and that's our time so hopefully we'll see tomorrow on the Bible guys,