Americans are faced with questions and issues that never existed before. Stresses are building to levels which are destroying relationships, impacting communities and causing significant emotional reactions. How are Christians to deal with these questions and issues?
The Built on Truth Series offers powerful suggestions to Christians about how to deal with difficult questions and issues in a transparent and consistent way. Others may not like or agree with the outcomes, but they should be able to understand how they were attained.
Some foundational assumptions of Christianity are God exists and is active in the world, God created everything, and the Bible was provided by God so people can know what to believe, how to make choices and how to live according to God’s standards.
A good next step is to find direct and indirect Scriptures pertaining to the subject at hand.
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In 2 Timothy 3:16-17, Paul wrote, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
When Paul wrote that, he probably was strictly referring to the Old Testament. However, as indicated in 2 Peter 3, writings by Paul and others were coming to be considered Scripture, too.
The point of that entire passage was all Scripture is useful to equip all servants of God to do every good work. However, many modern Christians focus on the first part – all Scripture being God-breathed. That being true, how did the God-breathed scripture get to us today, especially the New Testament?
We don’t have specific records, but the typical historical process would have looked something like the following. The New Testament authors either wrote their writings personally, or dictated to their personal assistants or scribes. Scribes were professionally trained men who took great pains to exactly copy what they were supposed to copy. The first copies would have been copied by other scribes as the originals got passed around, and those copies would have been copied by others. Both the originals and copies were made of fragile materials that degraded over time, so it was important additional copies continued being made.
