Spiritual gifts part 48: The night that everyman heard from the God-man

Pastor-Teacher
John Farley
Sunday,
November 7, 2010

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Spiritual Gifts Part 48: The night that everyman heard from the God-man.

The Doctrine of Spiritual Gifts

Point 2. The Giver of the Gifts: The Person and Work of God the Holy Spirit.

B. The second ministry of the Holy Spirit at salvation is called regeneration or being born again. It is taught in JOH 3:3-8; TIT 3:5; 1PE 1:23.

This is the record of an actual conversation.

How can we know that our Bible is authentic?

“Canonicity” by R.B.Thieme, Jr.

Original + human copier = errors.

Scholars who eliminate the mistakes that scribes made are called textual critics.

•  5,500 Greek manuscripts
•  8,000 copies of the Latin Vulgate Bible
•  11,000 copies of the New Testament in other languages (Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic)

We have a fragment of the gospel of John that dates back to just 29 years from the original writing - from the John Rylands Papyri, dated at 125 AD.

The earliest copy of Homer’s writings dates 500 years after he wrote them. That compares to under 100 years for the New Testament.

There are thousands more copies of New Testament manuscripts than there are of any other ancient writing.

The internal consistency between those documents is 99.5% accuracy.
Homer’s manuscripts have an internal accuracy of 95%.

If you want to throw out our Greek manuscript of the New Testament, then you would have to also throw out Homer, Plato and Aristotle.

God the Holy Spirit is in the business of fixing the mistakes of imperfect human beings.

The 1,000th word, over which there is some dispute (textual variant), is of so minor a consequence that it affects no doctrine or historic fact.

2TI 3:16
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;

aner = a male individual
anthropos = mankind.

anthropos - a representative member of the human race.

The Pharisees were the ultra-religious snobs of the first century.

On the outside they looked good, but inside they were full of “dead men’s bones” : lawlessness, hypocrisy, uncleanness.

Nicodemus was the representative of religious man, man striving on his own to please God by his so called deeds of righteousness.

John chose to emphasize the Greek identity, so he represents the Gentile world.

His name in the Greek can be translated “one who conquers the people”.

MAT 23:4
They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.

So we have everyman, religious man, Gentile and Jew. Whosoever.

The Sanhedrin, the ruling body of the Jews, recognized Jesus’ miracles as authenticating Him as a true teacher from God.

However, the nation of Israel wanted a Messiah to rescue them from the political domination of Rome, not the deadly domination of sin.

The true miracle takes place when someone believes in Jesus Christ for salvation!

Every human being needs to be born again.

His problem is his physical birth, his position and condition in Adam.

Man needs a new position and therefore a new birth.