News flash: You don't have to respond!! You even put him on "Ignore."
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Do We Need to Defend the Bible?
- Thread starter John of Japan
- Start date
And your goal is to do what? I always assumed that the Holy Spirit convinced people to come to the lord. Was I mistaken?
Forget it… I was trying to formulate something and it didn’t materialize.
Our goal is to obey the Great Commission. "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go THEREFORE and make disciples of all the nations......" It is precisely because God is sovereign, and the Holy Spirit convinces people to come to the Lord that we are to go. See Luke 24:46-47; Mark 16:15; Acts 1:8. Because so many of the churches in Britain have not been doing their job of evangelizing the lost, huge numbers of people here, especially the young, have no knowledge of the Lord Jesus, and as a result they are anxious, depressed, self-harming, and without hope. We need to obey our Lord's command and reach out.
The USA is not far behind you… but why the gospel of Luke and not John? Isn’t John the Love Gospel?
In my boyhood and without a father, the church clergymen visited our home and helped with food etc. But if someone was not active in our lives well ya know. It takes a comment to get peoples attention… not dogma… and kids see that.
And discipleship takes a ton of time to cultivate.
I think I remember you writing that the Japanese had a Bible already before you showed up. Why did you spend so much time translating a Bible in Japanese if they already had one? Why not just stab a sinner with it?
A fair question.
1. The conservative Japanese version is analogous to the NASB, and supported by the Lockman Foundation. Like the NASB (and most modern versions they want control over who uses more than a certain number of verses. That's just wrong (2 Cor. 2:17, where "corrupt" in the KJV is "peddle"). We wanted a NT anyone could use without getting permission or paying money. Now Japanese can "stab a sinner" without asking permission! Thousands of John & Romans were given out free after the Fukushima Earthquake, and 86,000 were passed out at the Tokyo Summer Games, all free!
2. I'm a Byzantine priority guy, and the only TR/Byz NT ever translated in Japanese history was in very difficult classical Japanese, now long out of print.
3. Translating the NT became a huge spiritual blessing to Uncle Miya and me.
4. Gaining expertise in Bible translation prepared me to be sent to Africa to train translators for a week. They are now working on a Cameroon pidgin translation.
5. I didn't know it at the time, but God was preparing me to start, lead, and teach in an MA program for Bible translators. I am so blessed to train Bible translators, now working in several people groups to produce translations for those who have no Bible!
About #1, the Lockman Foundation actually sued the Japanese translation team, having limited the copyright to just them. The Japanese team had to pay $36,000 (I think it was) just to get their own copyright! That's downright shameful! Our translation is now being used in various places without our permission and without paying us money, just like it ought to be with the Word of God!
Happy New Year!
Here is the quote from the OP that I am disagreeing with, "There is nothing the Word of God that commands us to defend it. It is God's Word. He can defend His own Word."
We are to defend God's word. What you disparage as a "hijack" I call a defense of God's Word.