Stedfast

Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world, 1st Peter 5:9.

It is required by the Lord himself that his servants be stedfast. He requires a fixedness of purpose and doctrine; Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord, 1st Corinthians 15:58. To be stedfast, is to be unmoveable. It is to be impervious to change. The Oxford English dictionary defines stedfast as: Of a person, esp. a soldier in battle: Maintaining his ground. Also, of a battle: Fought without change of position.

We live in a day and age when the sing song, wiggly jiggly, happy sappy apologists for the new versions do not expect the word of God to be stedfast.(Think Mark Ward, the Howdy Doody of faux scholarship, or for those who remember the Exorcist, the Captain Howdy of Logos Software.) In the parlance of their thinking, God says, "do as I say, not as I do". You must be stedfast, but his word can shift with the times. It no longer matters to them that there is no book on earth that they can ultimately trust.

A Bob Jones Graduate with a doctorate in English recently told me that God hid the word of God in thousands of manuscripts all over the earth to keep it safe. This is the new thinking of men feeling like they need to square the circle, or explain the inexplicable. It is a non-sensical conceit that puts to rest all of the curiosity of spirit with which God enabled man to seek truth. Such a repression of the intellect of man has worked for years in the evolution crowd and this silly crowd has found solace therein. If I told you that I had left you a priceless inheritance, but to keep it safe I hid it all over the earth so that you could never have all of it, would that satisfy you?

For those of you who the persuasions of such foolishness have not made into spiritual and intellectual eunuchs, God requires a stedfastness in his word. For if the word spoken by angels was stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompence of reward; Hebrews 2:2. So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God, Romans 10:17. How can people be stedfast in the faith, if the word of God is shifting sand?

The happy sappy crowd gets around such an obvious contradiction to their thought process by telling us that nothing essential to faith has been removed. They get away with this in their own minds by becoming the judges of what is essential. If something becomes obscure in a new version, they do one of two things. They search for a place where the new version might say it, or they declare what we have called essential to be non-essential.

When I have people in my church who shrink at the seeming impossibility of certain prayer requests, I often ask them; "Is there a God?". "If there is a God, what does he say?" We then turn to the applicable scripture and we read it. I would like to ask the willy-nilly-any-bible crowd, "Is there a God?". "Did he say that he would preserve his words?" "Did he fail in stedfastness during the 3rd and 4th centuries?"

You can be sure that the one who made a promise in Isaiah 59:1 has remained stedfast; As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the LORD, from henceforth and for ever. What bothers that crowd is that is that if they acknowledge that verse to mean exactly what it says, they know to which bible it refers. That might put a crimp on their income.