The fact that we have the holy Scriptures is a wonderful miracle and one of the greatest examples of God’s goodness to poor sinners. His elect people not only have been saved by the grace of God, but He has given us the good news of that salvation in the Bible. It contains an accurate history of the beginning of the world, of the history of the Hebrew nation, and of the ministries of our Lord and the apostles. It tells us that God has saved His people and how He did it, and gives a multitude of instructions so that we may be well-furnished for a godly and useful life.

Given the singular instance of God’s providence in the giving of the Bible, it is not reasonable that He would have failed to watch over the text of the Scriptures to see that it was preserved for His people down through the ages. Three of the gospels record that the Lord has promised, “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” As has often been noted, this passage does not say that Jesus promised the preservation of His word as a book, but of His words in particular. In short, this verse promises the preservation of the text of the Bible. “Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,” Peter told us, and the words that they spoke have been preserved for us.

The original text of the Old Testament is in Hebrew, with a few passages being in Chaldee. The text of the New Testament is in Greek, which was the most universal language of that day. While none of the actual original documents which were penned by the inspired writers are still in existence, we do have the text of the Scriptures in the original languages which has been painstakingly pieced together by comparing hundreds of old manuscripts. When we consider the vehement hatred of Satan for the pure word of God and the extraordinary methods which he has used to combat and destroy the Bible, it must be one of the most wonderful of God’s providential dealings with us, not only that He has preserved the original text of His Bible down to this day, but that He has raised up men of eminent scholarship who have believe that this text is Holy Scripture and who have forthrightly contended for that fact.

Not only has God given us men of learning who have defended the purity of the original text, but also those who have diligently translated the Bible into the languages commonly used in different eras of the church. William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible in the early 1500’s was a landmark work which had a significant influence upon the King James translators in 1611. The King James Translation, of course, has been universally used in the church in America and has been of immense usefulness to English-speaking people for almost four centuries. Indeed, the prevalent use of the King James across most of the English-speaking world until recent years largely contributed to the stability of the language over an unusually long period of time. That the church in America should have had the blessing of a reliable translation of the Bible which was universally used within her borders is a singular instance of the providence of God and has been a prime factor in the preservation of unity within the church. We may sometimes disagree among ourselves as to what a particular passage means, but at least we have no disagreement as to what it says.