New perspective...

Last year, our college group, GAP, had the wonderful opportunity to take a day trip down to San Diego to see the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit in the San Diego Natural History Museum. Talk about a once in a lifetime experience! It was so amazing to walk through and see all the carefully preserved pieces of leather and papyrus with the precious words of Scripture that have been passed down so carefully and delicately for thousands of generations. I'm reading a book called "How We Got The Bible" by Neil R. Lightfoot for my Bibliology class. It goes into detail about the processes that men have been involved in for centuries in order to accurately preserve the Word of God. I've been studying ancient manuscripts...what the difference is between the Sinaitic Manuscript and the Vatican Manuscript and all kinds of other stuff that I would have never thought would even really be important. Human beings are so cocky and proud.....throughout the centuries, thousands have come forward with arguments to refute the validity and accuracy of Scripture, but every time something comes up, God allows us to discover manuscript after manuscript that blows their arguments out of the water. Knowing the attention that was paid in painstakingly copying every word of Scripture for century upon century, I appreciate my Bible so much more. One thing that I thought was cool is that, when scribes were copying the Bible, they would often choose one word in the middle of the manuscript to help them measure exactly how many lines and words they needed in order to make an exact copy of the page. They didn't just copy the words, they made each page look exactly like the original. They knew and treasured the importance of the documents that they were copying and went to extreme measures to maintain perfect accuracy. There has been years of extremely precise work, beyond anything we would ever imagine, just so we can have the Bible. How many Bibles do you own? How many translations? In how many languages? When I went to the Resolved conference in June, I was sitting in the middle of 3500 people and the speaker told us to open our Bibles to a certain passage. The first thing I have written in my notes for that whole conference wasn't the speaker's name, topic, date, reference, or anything like that. The first thing I wrote was "I'm sitting in a huge room filled with thousands of people and each one of them has at least one copy of the Bible in their language." We take the Word of God so much for granted! We wouldn't have any of that if God hadn't provided us with so many faithful men over the years to copy, preserve, and eventually translate the Scriptures. I wish I could go back to the San Diego Natural History Museum and see the Dead Sea Scrolls again. I thought they were extremely cool when I saw them last time, but know I understand how unthinkably amazing they are! It's kind of like thinking Johnny Reb's is an amazing restaurant and then being introduced to Lucielle's!! Whoa!!!!!!!!!! Then you travel to Santa Maria and eat a steak at Jocko's and you're like.....WHOOOAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of course, that illustration is on an infinitely smaller scale, but you get the idea. :) Let us move forward in our Christian walk with a new appreciation for the treasure that we often take so much for granted: The Holy Bible.

"The grass whithers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever!"
Isaiah 40:8