Last Sunday Night’s Interaction with a Wolf

My pastor was away with his wife visiting grandkids and asked me to over the evening service for him, a privilege I happily accepted. Ours is a small country church filled with saints that love the Lord. Sunday evening, the numbers were down but the singing of favorite hymns was sweet and robust. I used as my text 2 Peter 1:16-21 describing the character of immediate inspiration. We had a wonderful time together around God’s word and in the Lord. These folks are not just saints but they have grown to be my friends.

About a third of the way through the lesson, an elderly gentlemen slipped in the back row, someone I had not yet met. After giving the benediction, and greeting the saints, I walked to the back of the auditorium to introduce myself to the gentlemen. He was curious about my training and I shared with him I was graduate of Westminster East in Philadelphia, which caused him to bristle a little. During my lesson I did not mention the King James Bible once. Indeed, the passages we examined have to do with the character of the immediately inspired Original documents of Scripture. I said after seminary training at Westmenter and Calvin Theologicaly Seminary I was never more convinced the King James Bible was the word of God in English. This statement sent the older gentleman into a fury.

I want everyone to remember that this church of faithful saints with a faithful pastor is in mountains of SW Virginia in one of the most sparsely populated counties in Virginia. And on this given evening, an older man, (who I later found out from the saints had been a Presbyterian pastor) began to unload in the back of this little country church with the same vile, critical arguments I have heard about the King James Bible throughout my academic career. “It’s not God’s word, it’s only a version. It only came into existence in 1611. If you want to read the Scripture you have to know the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic he barked.” Of course, almost everyone that ever told me that could not read any of the original languages and neither could he. I said, none of these dear people read Greek and Hebrew. Are you telling them that when they read their King James Bible, they are not hearing the voice of God in its pages, to which he said no. I turned to the saints and said that this is what I have been speaking about and warned you of but tonight its standing in the back of the church building. Scholars and scholar wannabees want to be the arbitrators of God’s Word, with their critical texts and versions, and rob the saint of hearing the voice of God on their own, and tonight, you’re hearing this firsthand. Asked him what version he was carrying – the ESV. He told me it was God’s word, a typical MVO response. I said it contains God’s words. I said there many missing verses in your bible something clearly, he was unaware of. Turn to Acts 8:37 I said. Finding the page he read 36…38. Where’s 37, I asked? Of course, there is no Acts 8:37 in the ESV.  He closed his ESV, and I said turn to 1 John 5:7 but He was done publicly embarrassing himself for having a bible that was missing many passages.

He resorted to cheap shots, criticizing my message, and my lack of education for holding such a backward position. I said the King James Bible is based on the Greek and Hebrew apographa to which he retorted, the apocrypha? I said it seems obvious that you do not know what the apographa is.

This story is very familiar to my son and I. What bothered me the most about this exchange was not his meandering argument, rather this ecclesiastical bully came into the evening service of the church hoping for a soapbox to sway the saints from their commitment to God’s word. This was especially egregious because the under shepherd of this flock was away. He said we would have to agree to disagree and said that was not possible. I can’t agree with anything he said. That the disruption he had brought into the sweet fellowship of the saints was despicable and shameful and that his only recourse was to stop what he was doing. When he had exhausted his pathetic but disruptive diatribe (because I would not stop telling him how appalling his disruption of our service was), I corralled him to the door and out of the church building.

I don’t know the state of his soul, but what happened Sunday night was the work of an ecclesiastic wolf who was going to bully his way into the minds of the saints with lies and falsehoods foisted upon us all by proponents of the critical text and modern corrupt versions.