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Vol. 11 No. 11 November 2009 |
Page 6 |
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Vol. 11 No. 11 November 2009 |
Page 6 |
D. Gene West
The Bible is a book of such historical accuracy that those with a liberal agenda will, often with extreme dishonesty, engage in what is called historical revisionism. In other words, when they find uninspired accounts of historical events that harmonize with the Bible, they will rewrite—revise—history to make it appear to contradict what the Bible says.
Doctrinally, men have been doing this for hundreds of years. They have simply written commentaries on the Bible to explain away its plain statements in areas where they disagree with the Bible. In more recent times they have become “brave” enough to develop some new “translations” of the Bible with their revisions found in the English text. A prime example is the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures—with John 1:1 being one of the most outstanding revisions.
This same kind of revisionism is found among historical theologians, and they often base whole revisions on what they consider to be obscure words of the Bible. An example is the crossing of the Red Sea by the Hebrews when they came out of Egypt. Liberals do not believe in miracles, so they will not admit that such was involved in the crossing of the Red Sea. They claim the Hebrew word is obscure and can be translated with “Red” or “Reed.” The Reed Sea is a marsh—swamp across which the Israelites could have waded on their way to the southern border of Canaan. Rather than admit the possibility of a miracle, they picture the Hebrews slogging through swamp water up to their knees—or deeper to approach the border of Canaan. However, they are wrong in their supposed obscurity of the Hebrew word, and one does not have to be a Linguist to know that. The Bible says nothing of the Israelites wading a swamp; rather it plainly says they passed through the Sea on “dry ground” (Exodus 14). Common sense, a rarity among liberals, demands that wherever they crossed into the Arabian desert, if they did so on dry ground, they could not have slogged through a swamp—unless they found a road that was high and dry, which would have been as miraculous as the parting of the Sea! That area of the world has been thoroughly explored today, and there is no such road there, nor is there any evidence that there ever was with a body of nearly two million people passing over it.
If one will read the history of the nations and the history of the Bible, he will find that the Bible is an extraordinarily accurate book having no historical blunders such as are found in the histories of man. Its histories are accurate and reliable, more than any written by man; no matter what attempts are made to revise it, it is what it is. History is either a compilation of facts or it is not. Example: John Calvin either lived or he did not; he was either a reformer in Scotland or he was not; he either taught the doctrine of hereditary total depravity or he did not. These are facts that are either true or not true, but they cannot be both at the same time no matter how much fiddling called revision is done.