Latest / Reformed Thinking / Many Sounds, One Voice: Cacophony and Clarity in the English Bible

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Many Sounds, One Voice: Cacophony and Clarity in the English Bible · Reformed Thinking

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  Welcome to Reformed Thinking, a deep dive into the clarity and
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  authority of Holy Scripture. We're tackling something today
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  that, well, I think almost every believer feels when they open
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  their Bible. It's this, this dissonance, the
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  noise, just the sheer volume of different voices.
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  That's absolutely right. For centuries, Christians have
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  held that the Bible is a light, you know, lamp to our feet.
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  Like Psalm 119 says, it's God's clear, sure word.
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  But we have to be honest, for the modern reader, especially
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  with this marketplace of English translations, it can sound less
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  like one steady voice and more like a a tangle of overlapping
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  sounds. Right.
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  And it's this apparent noise, this thing we're calling
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  cacophony, that we have to reconcile with the Bible's own
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  claim to be clear. And when we say cacophony, we
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  don't just mean chaos. The word means a harsh or
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  dissonant mixture of sounds. And the question for us today
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  is, is that noise a bug or is it a feature?
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  Is it something to apologize for, or is it actually part of
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  God's design? Our.
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  Research points to three distinct but related kinds of
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  this cacophony in the Bible we hold in our hands today.
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  Yeah. 3 layers. The first one is what we're
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  calling external cacophony. This is all the noise from the
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  huge number of translations of the Bible industry, all the
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  stuff around the text. That's the most modern layer.
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  OK. And the second.
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  The second is internal cacophony.
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  This is the clash of human voices inside the text itself.
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  You know, the debates, the arguments, the false prophets.
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  And the third one, which I think is maybe the most surprising, is
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  literary cacophony. This is when the language itself
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  is intentionally harsh or jagged, especially when it's
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  describing, you know, terror or judgment.
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  The sound of the words matches the severity of the topic.
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  Exactly. So the mission for this deep
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  dive is to look at these three forms of noise and then show the
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  theological resolution to show how all this apparent noise
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  under God's Providence actually ends up magnifying the one clear
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  divine voice which we find supremely in Jesus Christ.
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  It's almost like like an orchestra tuning up before a
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  concert. That's a perfect analogy.
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  You hear the high shriek of the violins, the deep rumbles from
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  the brass section, people talking.
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  It's a real tangle of sounds. But all that noisy prep is
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  leading somewhere. It's leading to a unified
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  Symphony. We just have to learn to listen
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  through the noise to hear the conductor.
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  So let's start with the noise that's probably loudest for most
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  of us today. The external one, the one you
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  hit the second walk into a bookstore, will go online.
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  For hundreds of years, the English speaking church had
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  something that our generation just doesn't have a single
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  dominant voice. I'm talking about the King James
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  Version. The KJV people memorized it,
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  they recited it, they heard it preached, all using the exact
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  same words that gave the English Bible a kind of singular
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  authority in the culture. And that singularity, it wasn't
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  an accident. It was reinforced by tradition,
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  by the Crown, by the simple fact that there weren't really any
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  other options. For generations, if you spoke
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  English, the Bible you quoted was the KJV.
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  But that all started to change, especially in the 20th century.
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  So what happened? What opened the floodgates?
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  Well, it was really a combination of textual discovery
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  and linguistic science. We started finding much older
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  and in many cases much better Greek and Hebrew manuscripts.
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  Things like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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  Exactly. The Dead Sea Scrolls Codex and
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  Atticus Vaticanus. All of these discoveries meant
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  the scholars could reconstruct the original language texts with
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  more accuracy than the translators had back in 1611.
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  So suddenly making a new translation wasn't just about
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  updating thee and thou, it was about using better source texts.
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  And you add modern linguistics on top of that.
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  Right. The science of communication,
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  which really took off after World War 2, put a new emphasis
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  on conveying meaning clearly to a modern audience.
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  The result is what we have now. You go online and you see that
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  the NASB, the ESB, the NAVNLTCSB even paraphrases like the
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  message. The English voice of Scripture
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  is now this this overlapping chorus.
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  And a big part of that noise comes from the fact that these
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  translations are based on different philosophies about how
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  you even do translation if you're not a translator
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  yourself. This can create what our sources
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  call stylistic noise. It just feels confusing.
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  Yeah, you can break the approaches down into a couple of
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  camps, though it's really more of a spectrum.
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  On one end, you have formal equivalence.
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  You'll sometimes hear this called word for word.
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  So that's trying to stick as close as possible to the grammar
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  and structure of the original Hebrew or Greek.
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  Precisely, the goal is to be transparent to the source
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  language, even if the English ends up sounding a little heavy
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  or wooden. But the key thing is that these
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  versions, they tend to retain really important doctrinal
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  terms, words like justification or propitiation.
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  That's why they're often favored for deep study.
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  OK. So what's on the other end of
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  the spectrum? That would be dynamic
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  equivalence or thought for thought.
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  This philosophy is focused on getting the meaning or the
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  function of the original text across in the most natural
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  modern English possible. They'll smooth out the grammar,
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  clarify metaphors, and use simpler words.
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  The priority is readability. And I guess most of the popular
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  versions today, like the NIV, are somewhere in the middle.
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  They are. They try to balance that
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  fidelity to the original with readability.
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  But Even so, when you hear them read next to a more formal
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  version, the differences in tone and phrasing really add to that
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  overall sense of cacophony. And it goes deeper than just
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  style. This is where you get what you
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  could call interpretive dissonance, because translation
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  is never just a mechanical process.
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  It's always full of interpretive choices, and those can affect
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  doctrine. This is where the noise really
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  starts to matter. Take a crucial concept like
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  Christ's sacrifice in a passage like Romans 3.25.
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  The more formal translations will often use the specific
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  theological term propitiation. And that word carries a lot of
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  weight. It's specifically about turning
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  away God's just wrath through a substitutionary sacrifice.
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  It's a legal judicial term. It is, but a dynamic equivalent
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  version might avoid that word. They might opt for a phrase like
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  sacrifice of atonement or the one who would turn aside his
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  wrath, and the effect is different.
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  It can make the doctrine sound, as our sources put it, softer
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  and less judicial. It risks downplaying the reality
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  of God's holiness and wrath, which is what makes grace so
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  amazing. So the same truth is being
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  presented with a very different theological.
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  Texture. Or think about the Greek word
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  doulos. It means slave.
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  Translators have to decide. Do you render that as slave,
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  servant or bondservant? And each of those words carries
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  different baggage in our culture.
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  Immense baggage servant can sound too gentle.
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  It loses the sense of ownership that's central to Paul calling
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  himself a doulas of Christ. But slave carries all the
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  horrors of chattel slavery, which might not be a perfect one
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  to one match for the ancient context.
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  Each choice has what are sources called different social and
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  emotional freight. And that choice forces the
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  reader to ask, Is this difference God's voice, or is it
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  the translator's choice? That question is the external
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  cacophony we. Even see it with gender
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  language. The Greek Adelphi literally
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  means brothers, but it was often used to mean brothers and
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  sisters or just fellow believers.
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  Formal versions might stick with brothers being strict with the
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  word choice. Dynamic versions might go with
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  brothers and sisters to be clearer for a modern audience.
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  Both have good reasons, but it creates friction.
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  O All this noise from the translations themselves is 1
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  layer, but there's another massive layer of sound from the
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  Bible industry. Oh, absolutely.
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  The moment you pick up a modern study Bible, you're not just
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  getting the text of Scripture anymore.
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  The pages are packed with human commentary with notes, charts,
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  maps, application questions. Themed Bibles, devotional
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  bibles, all of it. And these things are made with
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  good intentions to help people understand, but they inevitably
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  add more voices to the page. It's a further layer of sound.
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  But here's the pushback, and it's a fair one.
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  Aren't these things necessary? I mean, if the Westminster
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  Confession itself says some parts of the Bible are not alike
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  clear to all, doesn't the Bible industry just fill a needed gap
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  for the average person? They do fill a gap.
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  The problem comes when the human commentary starts to take on the
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  same authority as the divine text.
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  Our sources point out that many readers spend as much time in
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  the notes and sidebars as they do in the actual verses.
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  And that's the danger. The quiet authority of God's
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  Word can be drowned under the constant chatter of sidebars,
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  call outs, and branded insights. The notes stop being a spotlight
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  on the text and they start casting a shadow over it.
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  Which is why pastoral guidance is so important here.
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  We have to teach people how to distinguish the inspired text
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  from the derivative translation and all the human commentary
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  around it. A translation is a window, not
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  the light source itself. And when you see those
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  differences, propitiation here, a Tony sacrifice there, it
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  shouldn't lead you to skepticism.
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  It shouldn't make you think, well, if the experts can't
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  agree, how can I know? No, it should provoke you to dig
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  deeper, to study more carefully. The external noise, in a way, is
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  a call to move from being a passive consumer to an active
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  student of the word. OK, so that's the noise around
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  the Bible. But what about the noise in the
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  Bible? Let's talk about internal
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  cacophony, the clash of human voices that are recorded right
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  there in the Canon. Right.
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  This is where Scripture preserves the real noise of
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  human history. It records what kings and fools
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  and scoffers said. And sometimes their voices clash
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  violently. And this isn't an accident.
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  The Bible itself sets up this idea that confused speech is a
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  sign of sin. We see it right at the beginning
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  with the Babel paradigm in Genesis 11.
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  That story is the theme setter for human fragmentation.
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  You have humanity united in pride, trying to make a name for
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  themselves apart from God, and God's judgement is a literal
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  cacophony of tongues. He confuses their language.
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  And the project grinds to a halt.
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  You can't build a tower if the architect in the bricklayer
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  can't understand each other. So this confusion of speech is
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  established from the gecko as a signal of sin and its
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  consequences. OK, but here's the critical
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  question then. If confusion is a judgement for
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  sin, why does the Bible preserve so many confused, clashing human
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  voices within its own pages? Think about the long drawn out
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  arguments between Job and his friends.
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  Isn't recording all that just risking more confusion for the
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  reader? This is where the genius of the
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  Canon comes in. Scripture preserves these
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  competing voices, these often wrong voices, in order to sift
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  them by including the noise. God's final true voice stands
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  out in sharp relief, and the book of Job is the best example
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  of this. The book is basically 1 long
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  painful argument. You have Job who's in agony and
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  saying some pretty rash things about God, and then you have his
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  three friends. They see some things that are
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  technically true, God is just for example, but they miss apply
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  those truths so cruelly to Job's situation.
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  They have this rigid formula. You're suffering, so you must
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  have sinned in proportion to that suffering.
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  And that's the noise, isn't it? The chaos of human
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  interpretation. They're trying to shove God's
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  Providence into a neat little box that God himself rejects.
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  So for chapter after chapter, you're stuck listening to these
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  guys argue and you're left wondering who's right here.
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  And that cacophony becomes the necessary stage for God to
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  finally speak. He shows up in the whirlwind,
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  and he renders the final verdict that clarifies everything.
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  He looks at the friends and says, You have not spoken of me.
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  What is right as my servant Job has.
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  The noise of their bad theology is recorded specifically so
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  God's true wisdom can be displayed against it.
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  Moving from suffering to revelation, we find an even more
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  dangerous kind of internal noise.
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  This is the clash of true and false revelation in the
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  prophets. This is a fight over what God
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  has actually said. You see this so clearly in First
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  Kings 22. King Ahab gets 400 prophets
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  together and they all tell him what he wants to hear.
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  Go to war, you'll have a great victory.
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  It's a unified popular message. And then Micaiah, the one true
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  prophet, shows up and proclaims total disaster.
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  The noise of 400 voices against one.
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  And scripture resolves it by showing what happens.
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  Ahab goes to war and is killed just as Micaiah said.
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  This is why God is so harsh against false prophets in a book
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  like Jeremiah 23. Jeremiah.
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  Condemns those who speak visions of their own hearts who cried
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  peace, peace when judgment is coming.
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  It's a noisy message because it's popular and soothing.
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  And God contrasts those soothing lies with His own word, which he
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  calls a fire and a hammer that shatters rock.
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  So the Bible records the noise of the false prophets to condemn
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  it and to highlight how different the true Word of the
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  Lord sounds. And this conflict didn't just
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  stop at the Old Testament. We see it in the early church
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  too. The New Testament shows us the
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  literal worship chaos that was happening in Corinth.
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  Can you imagine that scene from First Corinthians 14?
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  Their services were just disorderly.
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  You had multiple people speaking in tongues at the same time with
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  no one interpreting, people trying to prophesied over each
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  other. It was an auditory mess.
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  Paul even says that an unbeliever walking in would
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  think they were all out of of their minds.
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  So Paul has to deal with this real, noisy internal cacophony
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  that was hurting the church's mission.
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  And he doesn't just tell them to be quiet.
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  He gives them specific principles of order.
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  Do things decently and in order. And here's the key.
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  He grounds his command for clarity, not in, you know, good
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  liturgy, but in the actual character of God, he says.
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  For God is not a God of confusion, but of peace.
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  The noise of their chaotic worship becomes a foil that
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  helps clarify who God is. He's a God of order, and his
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  church should reflect that. All right, so we've looked at
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  the noise from outside the Bible and the noise of conflict inside
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  the Bible. Now we get to the third form,
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  literary cacophony. This is when the language itself
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  is intentionally harsh or jagged.
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  Yes, this is where dissonance becomes a deliberate rhetorical
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  tool. The form of the text bears
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  witness to the weight of its content.
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  When the Bible is describing sin or judgement or terror, it often
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  refuses to speak in smooth, polished cadences.
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  It uses verbal overload, piled up images, things that make it
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  difficult to read. And why do that?
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  Why be intentionally harsh? Because the language has to
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  match the cosmic reality it's describing.
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  A text about divine wrath and cosmic upheaval should not sound
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  like a Hallmark card. If the content is violent, the
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  language has to reflect that violence.
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  It becomes jarring because it's talking about world shattering
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  events. We see this so clearly in the
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  prophets and in apocalyptic literature.
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  Absolutely. Take the Book of Nahum chapter
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  3. It's describing the judgment on
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  Nineveh, and it is relentless. You get phrases like the crack
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  of the whip and the rumble of the wheel, the galloping horse
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  and the bounding chariot. It just keeps coming at you.
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  Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear,
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  hosts of slain heaps of corpses. It's it's almost exhausting to
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  read aloud, as our sources say the rhythm is intentionally
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  unsettling. It is, and that dissonance in
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  the language is part of the warning.
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  The prophet is trying to shake the reader out of complacency.
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  The form itself delivers a moral punch.
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  And then you get to the Book of Revelation, and it's this idea
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  amplified to the absolute maximum, Chapters 8:00 and 9:00
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  with the trumpet judgments. It's just a bombardment of
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  chaotic imagery. A burning mountain thrown into
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  the sea. The star Wormwood poisoning the
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  water. Locusts coming out of the abyss.
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  It's a verbal storm. The syntax can be broken.
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  The metaphors seem to clash. It's designed to resist a quick,
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  easy reading. That jagged soundscape perfectly
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  matches the spiritual and eschatological chaos being
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  described. Our sources have this great
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  line. It says this literary cacophony
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  functions like a siren, shrill, unpleasant, but life saving for
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  those who heed it. That's perfect.
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  A soft, melodic siren would be useless.
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  The tame, softly spoken apocalypse would be a
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  contradiction in terms. When a translator tries to
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  preserve that roughness in English, they're trying to
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  preserve the moral and emotional violence of the original text.
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  So if we try to smooth it all out, we're actually in danger of
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  domesticating God, of sanitizing the very sins He's condemning.
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  The Bible sounds harsh because sin and judgement are harsh
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  realities. And this harshness has kind of
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  pastoral wisdom to it too, especially when you look at the
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  psalms of lament and imprecation.
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  Right Psalms like 69 or 137. The language there is so raw and
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  jagged. You have believers crying out to
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  God, sometimes even calling down curses on their enemies.
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  And that reflects the reality of our experience, doesn't it?
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  Suffering and betrayal. They don't show up in our lives
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  as neat, well composed paragraphs.
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  They arrive as chaos and pain. The raw language of these Psalms
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  gives voice to that chaos. It's so powerful.
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  It's like the Bible is teaching believers how to bring even
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  their ugliest feelings honestly before God, instead of trying to
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  hide them under some veneer of pious niceness.
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  The. Literary cacophony.
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  There is proof that God can handle our unfiltered pain.
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  He invites it. And the really brilliant thing
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  is that this jarring language is an intentional choice.
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  You have this roughness right next to the perfect calm of
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  Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd.
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  I shall not want or the beautiful rhythm of 1st
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  Corinthians 13 on love. Scripture can do both.
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  It can offer serene comfort, and it can issue an abrasive
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  warning. The fact that sometimes he
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  awakens and rebukes in language that greats just proves that the
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  choice to be jarring is deliberate.
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  It's always for a purpose. OK, so we've laid out these
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  three kinds of noise external, internal, and literary.
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  If the Bible is so full of this dissonance, how can we as
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  Reformed believers still confidently say that the Word is
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  clear? The answer is in the doctrine of
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  perspicuity. Perspicuity just means clarity,
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  and it's a cornerstone of how Reformed theology views
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  Scripture. The Westminster Confession of
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  Faith in Chapter 1, Section 7 gives us really balanced
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  statement. It starts by admitting the
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  difficulty. It says not all things in
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  Scripture are alike plain in themselves, nor like clear to
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  all. It acknowledges that some parts
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  are hard to understand. It doesn't pretend the difficult
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  parts don't exist. It knows that genealogies or
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  some of the detailed prophecies in Daniel are harder than, say,
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  the story of the Good Samaritan. Right, but this is the key.
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  The confession goes on to say that those things that are put
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  are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for
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  salvation, are so clearly propounded that even the unlearn
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  it may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.
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  So clarity isn't about everything being simple, it's
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  about sufficient accessibility for salvation.
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  The fact that there's difficulty at the edges doesn't take away
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  from the clarity at the center. Exactly what remains clear
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  enough for anyone? The gospel of Christ in John
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  3.16. Reality of sin and grace.
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  The call to repentance and faith.
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  The basic outline of obedience in the 10 commandments.
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  You don't need a pH. D in Greek to know that Christ
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  died for sinners and calls you to trust Him.
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  That clarity at the center is what the doctrine of perspicuity
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  protects. So this doctrine is the answer
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  to the cacophony. It basically says the noise is
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  more a reflection of human confusion and our need to study
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  than it is a failure of God's word.
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  The core message is still perfectly audible.
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  And this is where the church's guides become so important for
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  navigating the noise. God hasn't left us alone to
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  figure it all out. Confessional theology gives us a
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  framework. So documents like the
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  Westminster Standards, they act as carefully crafted summaries
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  of what the church has learned from Scripture over centuries.
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  They help us hear the Bible's unified message.
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  They protect believers from doctrinal novelty or from
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  building a whole theology on one difficult verse while ignoring
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  the plain teaching of the rest of the Bible.
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  The Confessions basically say God has spoken clearly and after
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  centuries of study, here is a summary of what He has said.
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  They use the clear parts to help us understand the harder parts.
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  But we have to be really precise about authority here.
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  The confessions are always secondary.
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  They're under Scripture. The Bible alone is the supreme
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  judge. The confession is a tool, a map
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  to help us test every translation and every sermon by
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  the Canon of Scripture itself. It's not a substitute for the
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  Bible. But the deepest theological
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  answer, one that really resolves all three forms of cacophony, is
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  a doctrine of Christ. Christ is the supreme, the
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  final, the ultimate divine speaker.
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  The first chapter of Hebrews is so crucial here.
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  It says that God spoke in many ways through the prophets in the
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  past, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son.
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  Christ is the Word made flesh. All the other sounds and signals
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  were pointing to Him. And all that internal clash of
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  voices we talked about, it's all enclosed within this unified
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  testimony to Christ. Yeah, Jesus himself said the
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  Scripture is bear witness about me.
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  So the conflicts in Job, the warnings, the prophets, the
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  confusing laws, they aren't random.
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  They're all part of a story that finds its solution in him.
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  You see him doing this work after the resurrection on the
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  road to Emmaus. He walks those two disciples
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  through all the scriptures and shows them the things concerning
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  himself. He shows them how the Law, the
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  prophets, the Psalms, all these diverse genres and voices all
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  find their unity in Him. And if we learn to read the
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  Bible backward from Christ, the coherence just shines through.
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  The temple sacrifices become clear pointers to his final
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  sacrifice. The harsh judgments become
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  warnings about the sin that he would bear.
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  The cost for. The cacophony of the Old
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  Covenant exposes human failure and makes the singular perfect
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  voice of Christ in the New Covenant stand out.
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  And the Holy Spirit's work is to open our deaf ears to hear that
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  voice in the written Word. The ultimate question through
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  all the noise is whether we are learning to hear the living
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  voice of Christ calling us to Himself.
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  That knowledge is the coherence that silences the cacophony.
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  So we've looked at these three layers of noise the external
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  cacophony of translations, the internal cacophony of human
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  conflict in the text, and the literary cacophony of harsh,
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  jagged language. And we've seen that none of them
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  cancel out the clarity of God's Word.
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  They actually expose human confusion and magnify the
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  reality of a God who speaks both comfort and warning.
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  And the resolution is found in perspicuity and supremely in
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  Christ, the unifying voice of all Scripture.
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  Let's go back one last time to that analogy of the tuning
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  orchestra. The Bible can really sound like
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  that. You're in the concert hall call
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  before the performance, and you're hit with this tangle of
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  sounds. The violins are making that
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  high, jagged noise. The brass is rumbling.
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  The woodwinds are doing their own thing.
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  It's a genuine mess of sound. And that noisy preparation, it
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  can be irritating. It challenges your expectation
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  of the beautiful, unified music that you came to hear.
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  It's hard to find the melody when every instrument is off on
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  its own. The challenge for you as the
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  listener is to learn to tune your ear through that initial
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  abrasive noise, to recognize that every single sound, every
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  difference between translations that makes you pause, every
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  recorded conflict between prophets, every harsh warning is
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  ultimately a note being tuned for a grand, unified harmony.
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  A harmony that's held together by its central theme, the Word
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  made flesh. You're not listening to a random
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  collection of noises. You're hearing the necessary
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  preparation for the story of redemption, all centered on
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  Christ. So the final thought we want to
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  leave you with is this How might your own listening habits change
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  if you consciously try to hear the living voice of Christ
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  speaking through the chaos of human words and the clamour of
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  the industry, knowing that all that noise is merely the
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  prelude?