The Whole Bible

The Old Testament Law functions like an X-ray!

When you break your arm, you need to get an X-ray and it shows you the broken bones. The X-ray doesn’t treat or heal the break, it simply shows where the problem is. That’s how the Old Testament law functions, its shows where the problem is. It showed people that they couldn’t actually meet God’s standards of living. It showed people that they had a problem and that God was the only one to fix it.

Alongside the Old Testament law was a system of sacrifices which served to bring the people to God to ask for forgiveness. The law showed their failure, and the sacrificial system provided a process of repentance and forgiveness. The sacrificial system was always about the heart of the person, not just the transaction.

In Psalm 51 (in the Old Testament) King David expresses it like this:
16         You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
                        you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
17         My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
                        a broken and contrite heart
                        you, God, will not despise.

Many people think that the transmission of the Bible until now has been like a game of Telephone or Chinese whispers (or whatever less offensive name you call it).

If you don’t know the game, it involves passing a message along a line of people and seeing if the original message can get through without being garbled or misunderstood. Invariably, the message accumulates errors over the course of time and the message at the end bears no resemblance to the original. It could be labelled a ‘transmission problem’.

With the Bible, people imagine that the original handwritten document has been through many modifications over time, and every error has been transmitted to later copies.

In fact, that’s not how it works. Today’s bibles are translated from the most ancient documents available and therefore much of the ‘transmission problem’ doesn’t exist because we are much closer to the original source.

There are many other factors that attest to the historical accuracy of the Bible.