By Rev. J. F. Shearer 

The sermon preached by the Rev. J. F. Shearer at the 1995 Annual General Meeting. The Rev. J. F. Shearer was Minister of Nuffield Church of England (Continuing), Honorary Secretary of the United Protestant Council, and a member of the Society’s General Committee.

In the word of God, the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy and in verse three, in the middle of that verse we read this statement: ‘man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live’.

Now, of course we do not and must not divide the Old Testament from the New, nor the New Testament from the Old. But it must surely never cease to surprise us how all the foundational truths of God’s revelation to men are to be found in the first five books, the books of Moses, the Book of the Law. In fact, this particular verse, as you will know, is transferred also into the New Testament by our Lord’s use of it in His conflicts with the devil. Matthew 4.4 and Luke 4.4 also say that ‘man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’.

In these days in which we now live, as we have already observed this afternoon, we are seeing a most serious decline in true religion, a most rapid flight from the fundamentals of our faith on the part of churches, on the part of ministers, on the part of individual Christians. Sometimes we wonder, why is this, what is happening? I want to suggest to you this afternoon that in this Scripture we have the most fundamental matter of all, the issue which very largely accounts for the present raging apostasy. It has to do with our attitude to the Word of God.

Not by bread alone

The Divine prescription is this: man must not ‘live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord’. It is most instructive to note that this exhortation occurs in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, when earlier, in the fourth chapter, the second verse, we read ‘ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it’. What is the significance of that? It is this, that in the fourth chapter we are exhorted to preserve the text of Scripture, not to add anything to it and not to take anything away from it. Then, in the eighth chapter, having preserved the text we are commanded to nourish our souls upon it, all of it, every word of it.

Quite clearly, unless we preserve the full text of Holy Scripture we cannot feed upon every word of it; therefore, in these days, in which men are steadfastly refusing to accept every word of God, there are bound to be consequences. Nothing else can adequately explain the serious downgrade of our churches, bringing in its train the most rapid moral decline of our national life. All of this is part of the most serious and worldwide apostasy that this Gospel age has ever seen. Man lives, of course, by earthly bread, but not now by heavenly bread, the Word of God. That Word is corrupted, despised, rejected. We will, therefore, now look at three particular things. First of all, we will examine what the Word of God actually says. Secondly, we will look at the attacks that are made upon it. Thirdly, we will see the consequences of those attacks.

What God says about Scripture

First of all, what does the Word of God say, what truth is stated? ‘Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’ Now our gracious and merciful God has provided for man, even despite his sin and rebellion against his Maker manifest from his birth in the sinfulness and corruption of his heart, all things necessary for his life on earth. God has provided fully: for his need of food to sustain his life, both that which is available from the wild, including the seas, our lakes and rivers, as well as that which may be produced by his labours in both cultivation and animal husbandry. Such blessings are not to be overlooked, and we should not need a harvest thanksgiving each year to be reminded of them. However there is a ‘but’, a serious qualification to this: ‘not by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord’.

Just as there is a great store and variety of food in this world for man to minister to his physical life, so from the mouth of God in His Word there is a great spiritual larder. To use a phrase which often flowed from this pulpit in former years, there is indeed ‘a feast of rich things’; and just as we need, indeed our lives depend upon it, and our bodily appetites force us to provide food for the body, we also need—and our eternal lives depend upon it—food for the soul. That food is the Word of God. That Divinely given diet is complete and the menu is ‘every word of God’, literally in the Hebrew, ‘all the words of God’.

During the past fifty or sixty years our knowledge about the dietary needs of the human body has advanced enormously. Many people take an interest in vitamins and trace elements, in the way our food is produced, in labouring and those mysterious E numbers. During the Second World War, the health of this nation improved significantly, not merely because some of the more exotic foods were no longer able to be imported, but more particularly because of the government’s issue of free orange juice, cod liver oil, and vitamin pills, which helped to provide a complete and balanced diet. Such care for our physical needs is right and proper, but it is not enough, nor is it the most important aspect. Not by bread only but by every word of God, for in the spiritual realm we need to feed ourselves upon that Word.

In the Book of Common Prayer we read, ‘Blessed Lord, who has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them’. But note that our God does not just say, ‘live by my Word’, but ‘by every word of God’. If He had merely said, ‘live by and feed upon my Word’, I would be forever free to draw on my favourite passage, to rehearse my favourite verses and to neglect all the rest. Where to any extent that does happen, when a minister overlooks or neglects certain parts of Scripture or a Christian never dares to explore certain parts of the Word of God, we will find lopsided Christianity. We are not free to do this, we are not free to neglect any part of Scripture.

For my personal, spiritual needs as a believer, my God has provided a perfect, full, and complete diet which is every word of God. It almost goes without saying, of course, that this does not mean that I have to take the whole Word of God in one sitting; raiding the larder is unhealthy indulgence and leads to indigestion at the very least. But as babes in Christ it does mean that we are to suck out the milk of God’s Word, progressing to more solid foods until we come to the strong meat of that Word. For the pure and complete Word of God has been wonderfully provided for us and preserved to our use. This is the heavenly Dietitian’s menu for His creatures; who are we to question it?

Man’s attack upon Scripture

Yet question it men have and so we come secondly to the attack upon Scripture. The orchestration of this opposition to the pure and complete Word of God is by Satan himself, who from the very first has been a hater and an opposer of that Word. ‘Hath God said ... ?’ He has done this by a variety of means, all designed to keep the Word of God from the people of God. For instance, passages that may seem to us to be difficult or controversial, boring, or repetitious have been deliberately set aside.

Then again there have been vociferous denials of the miraculous in Scripture, emanating from the German universities in the last century. These attacks have wrought havoc in many people’s minds; much more recently, at least in its effects, the enemy has sought to get inside the text itself and to change it from within. This destructive work began substantially in the mid-nineteenth century. What a time indeed that was, when the Sinaiticus Codex was discovered by Tischendorf in a waste paper basket in St Catharine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, without anybody questioning why it was in the waste paper basket in the first place! From the 1880s a new Greek text was available for the New Testament, reworked by human hands—the hands of men like Westcott and Hort—using new, corrupt principles of textual criticism.

The results of this modern reworking of the Biblical texts, whether it be Hebrew as well as the Greek, and inaccurate methods of translation going with it, are broadly as follows.

1. First of all, the personal pronouns of our Bibles in the God-given Hebrew and Greek are changed. As you well know, there are four separate pronouns for the second person—’thou’, ‘thee’, ‘ye’, and ‘you’—telling us whether it is singular or plural, whether it is subject or object. All four of these our modern versions translate as the comprehensive ‘you’, thus refusing to recognize what God has written.
2. Secondly, the names of God and especially of our Lord Jesus Christ are consistently weakened and reduced in power and glory. Thus our Lord Jesus Christ often becomes just Jesus Christ or even just Christ.
3. Thirdly, and speaking very generally, there are also doctrinal changes brought about by the significant downgrading if not the complete omission of truths which are reckoned to be unacceptable to modern man, things like sacrifice, propitiation, blood atonement, sin, and hell.

Today even Evangelicals have fallen for Satan’s lie, that it is not the words of Scripture which are inspired, but the ideas within it. So they repeat the cynical question, ‘Hath God said?’ In no other field of human enquiry and endeavour would man dare to exalt ideas and conceptions above words. In every area of knowledge we wish to enter, we must master new words to describe new things, we must know precisely what those words mean, what they convey. Our God is a speaking God, our God has spoken using words and made man in His image to use words, too. Can you imagine for instance an insurance policy, a food contents label, or a scientific law being conveyed by vague ideas and conceptions and not by actual words? Of course you cannot! The Word of God is given to us in terms of ‘it is written’ not ‘it is thought’.

Now these modern versions of which we are speaking are very successful. As soon as a new one appears, there is a great rush to buy it and a considerable amount of money pours into the publishers’ pockets. They jealously retain the copyright: how well the Devil knows how to lead men along his way! How perfectly does the Scripture describe his work, ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ (1 Timothy 6.10)! Not only that, but in use there is a power, a novelty, an excitement about these new versions. We must be warned: it is a spiritual power and dynamism which cannot be of God for it is the design of the enemy, as at the beginning, to corrupt the Word of God. So who do we think we are, to be so deceived? Why do we think we can adjust the diet that our eternal, all-wise, and all-knowing heavenly Father has provided for us?

Our bodily diet is important, we would agree; how much more so is our heavenly diet? ‘For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven’ (Psalm 119.89). How dare we play with it on earth! It is thus perfectly clear that we have no authority for ever being able to add to or take away from the Word of God for any reason whatsoever, be it our ideas, our intuition, or our scholarship, still less the fashions of this world. Not the Father, not the Son, not the Holy Spirit can ever do that, for our Triune God has declared that His Word is settled for ever. So we must be careful to be nourished by every word of it.

The consequences of changing Scripture

So we come thirdly and finally to the consequences, the result of having corrupted versions of the Scripture, the effect of either adding to or taking away from the Word of God. Now if my body is receiving a deficient, an inadequate diet, two things will follow. Firstly, I will become constitutionally weak, I will not have the strength to do certain things, I will not have the energy to sustain a normal day’s work, I will become much less than I ought to be as a human being. The second thing that will follow from that is that I will become vulnerable to the invasion of outside bodies, be they bacteria, viruses, or poisons. My body being so weakened will not be able to resist and I will easily fall prey to a serious condition, even a life-threatening one.

Exactly parallel to these things in the spiritual realm will be the effect of a deficient, incomplete, or corrupted diet from the Word of God. There is no doubt that the effect of the use of modern versions is that Christians become weakened, their spiritual constitution becomes weakened, and they become a prey to any and every heretical virus which now infects our spiritual environment. When the holiness of our God, the sinfulness of men and the unique redemption wrought by our blessed Saviour at Calvary are to any extent obscured, it is little wonder that a corrupted Bible produces corruptible Christians. A powerful and a deadening spirit is creeping across our churches. Ministers, even godly Bible men, are falling before a raging apostasy; the means of this happening is so often the adoption of a modern version.

Whenever we see a man using the New International Version in his pulpit, we can expect trouble ahead: a weakened spiritual constitution and a vulnerability to the deadly virus of things liberal, ecumenical, or charismatic. Unless an error is recognized—and only the full and pure Word of God will enable us to do that—then sooner or later men will fall victim to it. Unless we recognize dangerous rocks ahead we are unlikely to avoid them. To lose confidence in the text of God’s Word is to lose confidence in our chart and in our compass. Rather, we are invited to have every confidence in God’s Word.

Our Lord in Matthew 5.18 says, ‘one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled’. Not the smallest letter, nor a decorative curl to distinguish one letter from another shall be removed, and nor has it been removed from the text that has been passed down through the ages to us. Those Masoretes who so long ago and so painstakingly preserved the Hebrew text would not even correct an obvious spelling mistake, but passed them on because there was no doubt about the correct word. As a double check they also counted the number of letters and entered them in the margins and ran up the totals of each separate letter; thus they found that the aleph for instance occurs 42,377 times in the text and the beth 38,218 times and so on. Likewise, this was seen among the Greek scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who were head and shoulders in knowledge and learning above almost anyone in these days. There was no real disagreement about the text of God’s Word so that they could confidently say that this is ‘the received text’ given by God, received by men.

The text then from which our Authorised King James Version is translated has been wonderfully and providentially preserved. After all, it would be rather careless of God, as some would have us believe, to have given us His Word and then to have left it until the late second millennium before it was corrected. Nothing is more important than this textbook of Divine revelation. From the beginning in Deuteronomy to the end in Revelation we are warned of the serious consequences of either adding to or taking away from the Word of God. Therefore, we have every right jealously to guard the text behind it; and indeed we must jealously guard it, both for ourselves and for its translation into other tongues.

In the constitution of the newly-formed Continuing Church of England we have felt it right to require that the Authorised Version is used at all meetings and services. Some have charged us with being too narrow or unchurching people. We have no wish to be or to do either of those things, but what we are about is to insist that the pure Word of God is preserved for the people of God, that they may be fully led and built up in the faith. ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable’ (2 Timothy 3.16). When the apostle Paul was saying farewell to the Ephesian elders, having called them down from Ephesus to Miletus, fully believing that they would never again meet in this world, this is what he said to them: ‘I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up’ (Acts 20.32). That is what the pure Word of God does: it builds us up, it makes the Christian strong and makes us strong even to the resisting of the great pressures of a widespread apostasy.

That God honours His Word and brings blessing to His people is manifest. The splendid new headquarters of this Society are but a visual aid to God’s blessing upon His Word. Even more than that is the testimony to the pure, full, and complete Word of God to be seen in the lives of His people, who grow in grace and knowledge and understanding and continue to stand firm against all the workings of the evil one. ‘Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live’ (Deuteronomy 8.3). Remember that word ‘every’ is our chief Dietitian’s command for His people, ‘man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD’. Amen.

Lightly edited edited for online publication. Last updated on 31 October 2023.