00:00:00 Speaker 1: Christians everywhere are facing this reality. 00:00:03 Speaker 2: There have been so many people that, unfortunately, have made wrong decisions when it comes to who God is and who Christ is. Those who think that God doesn't want us to suffer simply haven't read the scriptures. 00:00:19 Speaker 1: You have gone through a lot. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: I ended up going to hospital after hospital, and for the next five years, I kept coming back to the hospital. 00:00:27 Speaker 1: So you're suffering without a definition of what's causing it. 00:00:31 Speaker 2: To this point, my body decided I'm done with this and I'm going to take a rest, whether you want to or not, and she said, this is the first time at e rehobd this. 00:00:49 Speaker 1: Well, Hello Dan Wallace and welcome to the Unbound podcast. Well, people who don't know you, everybody should know you, but for people who I don't know you, introduce yourself, tell us who you are and what you do, and we'll get into why it matters. 00:01:07 Speaker 2: Tony, thank you for the privilege of being on your podcast. This is exciting for me, and I'm You've been in my corner for years and I appreciate that. And I've been in your corner for years. I mean, they're doing important ministry and I hope that what I'm doing is important for the kingdom as well. 00:01:25 Speaker 1: My name is Dan. 00:01:26 Speaker 2: Wallace and I am the husband of Patti Wallace. Come this gin, we will be married for fifty one years. 00:01:34 Speaker 1: Congratulations. 00:01:36 Speaker 2: All the congratulations goes to her. I've just been going along for the ride because she's the one who has the patience of job and all this. But that's the thing you need to know about me. 00:01:47 Speaker 1: Well, you are a unique person with a unique gifting, with an absolutely unique calling as a new test Mescala, as a person who has spent a lot of times on manuscripts. We're going to get into that, but that's not where I want to start. I want to start out discussion on suffering. You have gone through a lot in your life in terms of things that you've had to face and go through and trust God in. One of the biggest is encephalitis. And you know, many people are struggling today with all kinds of chronic illnesses and things that on disappearing, who are having to believe God in the storms of life. So let's start off by talking a little bit about what you've been going through and that journey that God has taken you on. 00:02:46 Speaker 2: In March of nineteen ninety seven, I contracted encephalotis. I was doing way too much the weekend before, was involved in five conferences or speaking engagements, and you know what that's like. But my body decided I'm done with this and I'm going to take a rest, whether you want to or not. So I came home and I drove into my garage, and I mean I drove into my garage. I hit the back wall. Oh wow, which was the first time I had ever done that, and it was shocking to me. So I talked to my wife. She said, well, let's go see the doctor, see what's going on. And as I'm waiting for him, I'm lying down on the table and I couldn't get up. I couldn't sit back up, even sit up. And he came in and I asked my wife. At that time, I said, who's the president. It was nineteen ninety seven. Bill Clinton had been president for five years, and I couldn't remember this. So the doctor came in. He saw me and he said, well, I'm not going to just check you out. You're going into er right now. So they put me in the hospital for four days, and at the end of the four days, I couldn't walk. I needed to get a wheelchair. During those first four days in the hospital, I would have almost complete bodily paralysis that affected everything except my fingers and my mouth. And it would and I could feel when it was coming on. I would I'd say, oh, it's hitting now, and about forty five minutes later, I'd be in total paralysis. Couldn't move anything for about an hour or so. One time, they brought in dinner just as the paralysis was hitting, and I didn't say anything. So I'm looking at this food getting cold for an hour and I couldn't even get to the button to push it and say, hey, I need some help here. But there was a counselor. I said, I you know, I was really fascinated by this disease. Frankly didn't know what it was. But there was a counselor. 00:04:56 Speaker 1: You were fascinated. You're suffering? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I mean it was Is that what Greece colins do. They get fascinated by a self diagnosis and what's going on here? 00:05:07 Speaker 2: It's really interesting. And I said, they said need anything? I said, yeah, do you have a Christian counselor here? Yeah? Yeah, we do. So this lady who came in and she had her degree from a liberal school. I wanted to talk theology with her, and I taught and I basically shared the Gospel with her and how God poured his wrath out on his own son. And she said, this first time I'd ever heard this. That's cosmic child abuse. God would never do that. And now that's crept into some evangelical thinking, which is really scary to see. It used to be just a bastion of a liberal thought. And a little bit later a psychologist came in and he talked to me. He said, are you are you concerned, are you afraid you might die? Anything like that. I said, oh, no, not at all, because when I go, I'm going to be in the arms of Jesus. I'm sharing the Gospel with him. And he wrote up a report that said, this guy is not stable. He's got delusions of grandeur, thinking it's all because of me that I get to go to have a hid, and he didn't quite get the gospel message real well. So over the next several weeks, even months, I ended up going to hospital after hospital, and for the next five years I kept coming back to the hospital. I would be there on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year's Day, New Year's Eve, other times my birthday. You know, just every two or three weeks, I'd go back to the hospital. And at one point there was a nurse who they gave me again cyclovir, which is a slow drip drug. They had no idea what to do with me because my memory was just shot and I had no energy. I could walk maybe one hundred steps a day at one point, and so I was in a wheelchair for virtually a year, almost a full year. And during the summer, just as the school was out, I was getting this gan cyclovir, which is a drug that they give to AIDS patients. Not that I had age. They just they're throwing everything, including the kitchen sink at me. You know. They even said we're going to test you for syphilis, and I said, you know, if you do that, I'm not paying a time for that because I can guarantee you. So they thought it was mad cow disease. They just didn't know what was going on. It was a bizarre thing. 00:07:35 Speaker 1: Well, wait minute, for those who don't know what encephalitis is, can you just give a summary of it so that they can know what's the base of what you're going through. 00:07:45 Speaker 2: It's actually just swelling of the brain, that's all it is. And you get a high white white blood count that is in your system trying to protect you. And there's all sorts of things that come out of encephalized. There's a number of different kinds like menis and mad cow disease, and I guess syphilis is a sort of enciphialitis. The CDC got involved and they never figured out what it was. And I said, well, if you ever do, just name it after me, that would be fine. So I was joking about this, all this kind of stuff, and then during the summer I was getting these slow drips every day. They put in a stint to my heart and they had a flesh into my veins as well. And this against cyclovia that they gave me hour and a half drip in the morning, hour and a half in the afternoon. My wife was administering it, and it's kind of like napalm on the body, and they were taking blood twice a week to see if it was killing off any organs besides the disease. It did nothing, nothing for the disease. There was a nurse who had been a nurse for twenty five years, and she would come to the house and take my blood. And after a few times of doing this, she took my blood one day and or tried to from my arm and my vein collapsed. So she tried it on the back of my hand. As soon as she injected the needle, the vein collapsed. Then she tried another place, in another place, in another place, and another place. Every single time she got a vein, soon as she put the needle in it collapsed. It took her ten tries to get blood from me. She got it out of my big toe. That's what she had to do. And then she said, I've only had one other patient in my entire career that has a powerful subconscious mind, and you have a very powerful aversion to pain. I had a very powerful aversion to needles because I played football. Pain didn't bother me. But this kind it's antiseptic. You're supposed to not be in pain when you're seeing a doctor. You're supposed to be healed. But I just needles I couldn't handle. And so she said, I can't see you anymore. She was kind of growing fond of us and said basically, she said I don't want to be here when you die. So after several weeks of doing this that summer, when I'm on gen Cyclavir, here I'm in bed and I'm sleeping for twenty two hours a day. Twenty two hours a day I was asleep. I'd get up at about ten or eleven in the morning, wheel myself into the dining room, eat some oatmeal, get some coffee, and I could read a maximum of ten or twenty minutes a day total. So I couldn't read very much. But I asked a friend to get cassette tapes of s Lewis Johnson preaching through romans and so that's I could listen to that, which was well. 00:10:55 Speaker 1: I had as Louis Johnson for class at Dallas simitar so that I don't carry you deep. 00:11:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, I love listening to that. So here it is June sixth I'm lying in bed and the door is closed in the bedroom. My wife is at home that day, and all of a sudden, I get up and I yell, and I run towards the door. I wasn't hooked up to the IVY at the time. I run towards the door, hit it and fall backwards. And fell down. My wife came in, what's going on. I'm fighting Germans on Omaha Beach. It was D Day, the anniversary, June sixth, and I was hallucinating, and so she called the nurse and said, just against cyclover causes. No, it's not against cycle of art. Something else is doing it. We don't know what this is, but it's the encephralized somehow. So a little while later, four big NFL linemen came in paramedics, and I'm sure they had been NFL, because you know, they walk in and you don't want to mess with these guys. And they they rushed me down to Parkland Hospital in an ambulance, and I was strapped into the gurney in the back of the ambulance, and I'm with one guy in the back and he said, you know, I think you're doing just fine. Now I can let you out or take off the straps, and I said, please, don't. I keep having the urge to run out the back of the ambulance because I'm fighting dragons in medieval England and I've got to get out and get the sword and slay them, you know. And there were other times when I thought a train was coming right at me. You know, I'm just bizarre hallucinations. So they put me in the epilepsy ward at Parkland Hospital and I was there for five days, and they hooked up my brain to about twenty four diodes and I was in the room by myself. There's no other patient there. And every day when I'd go to the bathroom, when I flushed the toilet, I did not know where I was. I did not know when it was, and I did not know who I was. It erased everything. And it took me four days before I recognized that when I flushed the toilet that happened because it erased my memory. So it took four days to put these two things together. So I asked them, I know this is not the most most comfortable thing, wanting me take a leak, but I want you to aim the cameras at me while I go in there and see if there's anything else going on. They did. They said, you don't have aplepsy. We don't know what it is. It was encephalitis, but they didn't know what kind. 00:13:51 Speaker 1: So you're suffering without a definition of what's causing it to this point. But already, even as you take me on this journey that you've gone through, I'm seeing a lot of theology, maybe unintended theology, being communicated, because if I go all the way back to the beginning where you ask for a Christian counselor, and the person who came in under that designation apparently with not a Christian certainly didn't have a right understanding of God. But then you made another statement, some of the wrong thinking about God has crept into the evangelical world. That wrong thinking of faulty about suffering and God's relationship to suffering. Can we just take a moment to talk about that wrong thinking related to suffering because the Bible talks about it a lot, but we don't want it so bad we've created a false theology to keep us from dealing with. 00:14:53 Speaker 2: It right absolutely. 00:14:55 Speaker 1: What is your perspective on that? 00:14:57 Speaker 2: Romans Chapter eight, verse eighteen has been an exceedingly meaningful verse in my life. I do not consider the suffering of the present time to be worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed to us. This is the apostle Paul who said this. He suffered as much as any Christian error. He'd been stoned. They thought he was dead, shipwrecked, whipped, persecuted. The Lord Jesus when he called him on the road to Damascus, said you're going to suffer a lot for my name. Not that the suffering is what makes him worthy of salvation. It's rather that the suffering is a part of God's plan to bring more people into the kingdom. And Paul at one point said, he's got this thorn in the flesh, and we're not exactly sure where that is, but most likely some kind of suffering, and he asked the Lord three times to take it away. God said, my grace is sufficient for you. That's a huge lesson for us to understand. And at one of those times for Paul, when in Second Corinthians he talks about he knows a man in Christ who went up to the third Heaven. What he describes there is almost identical to people who have had near death experiences. There's a lot of features that he talks about, and most scholars would say Paul is speaking of his own experience the one time when he was almost dead, and so what he says, I don't consider the sufferings of the present time to be worthy. He's not talking about first world problems where all of a sudden your cruise control goes out. He's talking about real suffering. And think about the travel in the ancient world that was that was never easy. And Paul he suffered just a great deal. There's an icon of Paul early on and a description of him that he was bowlegged, and that may have been due to the beatings that he got, because that causes the muscles to go in some wrong directions and could have caused that very thing. For Paul to say, I don't think the sufferings of the present time are worthy to be compared has given me a great deal of hope. It does not matter how much I suffer. I know that God is there and He's going to bring me into his kingdom for Christ's sake and because of Christ, and for Christ's glory. 00:17:50 Speaker 1: So for the so for the Christian. You know, I've got a relative who's going through an extended time of suffering and it doesn't appear to heave an end to it. And Christians everywhere are facing this reality. And you appeal to Romans eight eighteen. There's a perspective that has to be integrated into the suffering to help us to endure the suffering victoriously and not defeated. The practical question is how does a person integrate that because the suffering is so visible or physical or painful, so that that doesn't get lost in the process of the pain. 00:18:45 Speaker 2: It's easy for us to get lost in the present conditions that we're facing, whether a personal suffering or trials, or our culture, society, or the political world or anything like that. It's very easy for us to focus on the now and to become such an existentialist that that's the only time we live. We should always be living for Christ and his glory, but we need to be living in the now, but not living for the now, and having that perspective of what suffering does to bring glory to God is critical now. To me, the most important passage on this that has really meant the most to me is Romans five eight. But God demonstrates present tense in Greek, his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. For God. He is everywhere, all at once, and He is every time, all at once, and so for God. For the try and God, the suffering of Christ on the cross is always present. His suffering. God delivered him up for us all He actually, in the Greek word means he betrayed him. How will he not freely give us all things? Romans eight thirty two. If that's the case, and Jesus went to the cross obediently and in the will of God, when you think about suffering, you have to think about what the Lord himself went through. It wasn't just that physical suffering, which was a beating within an inch of his life and then crucified nails in his hands and feet. Is carrying the whole world's sin on his shoulders and then cry out, my God, My God, why have you forsaken me. It's the only time in the Gospels where he doesn't call God father. He's treating him as his judge, because he's just born the sins of the whole world. And when I talked to people who have gone through suffering, even chronic suffering, that's the model we need to keep in mind. God knows what suffering is like. The God man himself knows it far more deeply than we ever will. I want to go back even before myn encephalitis, and a lesson I learned five years earlier. One of our four sons had cancer in nineteen ninety two. He was eight years old. It was discovered when they were about to do a biopsy because he had assist on his kidney, and instead of doing a biopsy, there were ten doctors at Children's Hospital, and I had asked, I want to make sure that at least one of these doctors is a Christian. These ten doctors were going to do this biopsy, and if it was a Whelm's tumor, which is an easy cancer to deal with and the success rate is terrific, that they would have taken that cyst out be fun. But one doctor said, I don't think we should do the biopsy, and they said why. I don't know, but I don't think it's right to do the biopsy. Instead, what they did is they cut him open and they took his kidney out, and later they discovered that it was renal cell carcinoma. That's one of the most lethal and quick acting cancers known to man. Andy was the first child in America in ten years with that disease and the one hundred and sixty second in the world ever known. Now, I'm such a goal oriented person, I had to study up on this, and the doctors said, mister missus Wallace, we don't know if we should give him chemotherapy as a preventive measure or not. Five of us say yes, five of us say no. You have to decide. We're giving you forty eight hours. Well, so I read everything I could on renal cell carsonomo, eleven different articles, and I saw in there a thread it had not yet been articulated as a thing, but that every single time they did a biopsy in that child, that child died from the cancer getting into the bloodstream and within months, three months, something like that. And so I was grateful at that point that they didn't do the biopsy, you know. And I also discovered that you either survived for two years or you don't. So after two years you are considered in remission from this disease. So for the next two years, my goal, what I was living for, was to see Andy be in remission. I was so goal oriented. I wasn't living in the now, and I was It was a bad time in my life. I did not handle suffering well at all. I started taking the boys to dog shows. We'd just gotten a dog, and I wanted to show the dog and I would be there on weekends on Sundays, and my wife, who is, as I said, has the patience of job, at one point just wrote a little letter and whenever she wrote a letter, that means I better sit up and pay attention because I've done something pretty serious. It's her very gentle way, and she said, where have you been the last several months? It seems like you care about that dog more than you do your family. And the problem was that I wasn't caring more about that dog. It was just too much pain for me to think about that my son could die, and so I put all my love in the dog, that if this dog died, it's not the end of the world. I was teaching a Greek class that summer, and one of the students I came in one day and I said, you guys have no idea what suffering is about. Who's ever gone through anything like this? Talking about just seeing my son on chemo and walking around the house with a bucket where he's throwing up the whole time, and at eight years old, at one point weighing forty five pounds while his twin brother weighed eighty five pounds. And I said, nobody's ever suffered like this. One of the students wisely said, God's own son has suffered a lot more. He buked his professor, and he did so with scripture, and it caught me up short, and I realized, Yeah, we can't ever claim that our suffering comes close to that, and that was within God's will. And so I see suffering like what Paul says early on in Roman's chapter five. He says that trials produced perseverance, person as produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint because of the Holy Spirit has been poured out within us. That's massive. God is behind the suffering because he's conforming us to Christ. 00:26:15 Speaker 1: Maintaining this eternal perspective and painful times. I can remember when my late wife Lois, who you knew, was suffering an extended time with a rare cancer gall bladder cancer, and just just over time got weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker. The thing that held me up held her up, but it also helped hold me up well. She kept bringing up this eternal perspective. She asked me, knowing that if barring a miracle, she wasn't going to make it. How long would it take her after she died to get to heaven just to just to hear, you know, to be answered from the body, to be present with the Lord. She would often just hold her hand up, almost inviting Jesus to take her. And I remember on our last night, I was laying beside her, and I would be that morning when she passed away. That she helped me be able to say in that moment, not my will, but Thy will be done, because her willingness to have an eternal perspective helped me to have an eternal perspective when I didn't want any eternal perspective in light of the pain that she was going through that I was in the family was sharing with her. And it is so even what you're telling your story, it is so critical that we help believers to keep that in front of them in the now, even though it may not be the not yet, so that they can so that they can make it through the now. But what is happening is there is this appeal to Isaiah fifty three that you know, he boils sufferings as a way of saying that this is not in the will of God because of was covered at the Cross. Of course, Jesus in the New Testament says he fulfilled that, but that gets extended. What is your response to people who use that scripture to remove suffering as something that God is involved with. 00:28:30 Speaker 2: They have no understanding of scripture. It's like the prosperity gospel where God wants your best life now kind of a thing. That's I think God uses most those who suffer the most, those who have been through the trials. That's the kind of person that God is honing for his glory. My good friend Ed Kamashevsky, he lost his seventeen year old daughter three and a half years ago. She was working at the chiropractor. The team went out for coffee. When they came back, she was dead on the floor. She just dropped dead, her heart stopped. And that kind of suffering, My gosh, how do people deal with that kind of thing? But what Ed and Shelley have done is they've recognized that this is part of God's will. That Emily, the night before she died, she wrote in her journal fourteen pages. She's writing in a journal, And the thing that she wrote that really sticks out in my mind is when people think of me, I want them to think of Jesus, and that's exactly what has happened. So here is a friend who has gone through amazing struggles. When parents lose a child, marriages typically in in divorce within five years, and Ed and Shelley has said, we are not about to let this terrible tragedy be unused by God because he still is in control of everything. And those who think that God doesn't want us to suffer simply haven't read the scriptures good grief. I mean, just read the Old Testament, read the New Testament. That suffering is meant for Christ's glory and for our character. 00:30:27 Speaker 1: So a question that a person has to ask and their loved ones is God, how do you want to use what I'm going through for your glory and my good in the midst of this pain then I am currently experiencing exactly. 00:30:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the attitude that we should have that. 00:30:47 Speaker 1: Has to be reinforced over and over and over again, because it's easy to lose sight of that when you're going through it. And if you don't have people around you and people shepherding you through that way of thinking, you can get mad at God, you can rebel against God, you can you know resist him rather than leaning into him doing not time. 00:31:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, no kidding. I've gone through a tad bit of suffering since the encephalitis. I started the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts five years later in two thousand and two, and while on expedition throughout the world, I've been in thirty nine countries now and we've digitized Greek New testam manuscripts on four different continents. I have injured my left knee, my right knee, both wrists. That was when I was carrying one hundred pound bags in each arm up stairs in a hotel that did not have an elevator and we were on the first floor and it ruptured discs in my neck and carpal tunnel. Serious damage in both hands and my back. I've had surgeries on all those joints. I feel like I've got more titanium than bone in my body now. And my wife caught me up short just the other day. She said, you know, I haven't heard you say when you get up that it's a good day. You start complaining about the pain. And I said, you're absolutely right. It's easier for us to fall back into that. And I fell back into it. All that I've gone through, I should know better. Like the Israelites when they went through forty years in the wilderness, they should know better. I'm just as frail and sinful as the next guy, probably more so. But I love having a good wife who brings me back to the Lord. 00:32:45 Speaker 1: Well, having people who love you in your life, but who also love God and can bring God to bear in those times, which is why we can't be, you know, isolated lone range of Christians, because because we may not have the strength to keep going on our own, need to be picked up by some other people. So that's good. So you were talking about you had stuff a light is I kind of cut you off, but but go ahead to the next phase of that. 00:33:15 Speaker 2: So by October of ninety seven, my doctor realized, he said, you're not going to last another month. You're not going to live another month. I'd already been to four hospitals, four different hospitals, and I'd already had four spinal taps. Those are not particularly pleasant things to have. And I had a brain flesh where the it's too graphic to tell you, but the flesh iodine into your brain, and they said it's going to feel like a warm handtael on your face. Well, it felt like somebody just poured scalding water on my face, but it only lasted a split second. I'm glad they didn't tell me it's going to be like that, and I had to be awake when they did that for various reasons, but they did all sorts of things to me that I almost felt like medicine today is simply trying to torture you so that you can say, uncle, em, I'm not going to stay in the hospital anymore. But it's a bit more sophisticated than that. But it was a difficult time and it's still in my body. It was in twenty fifteen when my center went to the National Library of Greece and started to digitize. There are three hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts in Athens, one hundred and fifty thousand pages of manuscripts. It took us two years. We trained forty four people to do the digitizing, and we post all our images for free forever on the internet so anybody can have access to them. It was my task before the digitization teams came to be in Athens at the National Library, preparing these main for digitization. Now what that meant was I had to count how many leaves there were, how many pages, measure the dimensions in six different places. I had to write up a table of contents that here's where this book starts and ends, what the general date of the manuscript was, a lot of things that I had to do. I won't get in all the details, but it would take about four hours to prepare each manuscript for digitization. Because in the most mundane way you can understand this. If I say this manuscript has two hundred and eighty one pages, and that means or two hundred and eighty one leaves, that means that you're going to get two hundred and one pictures on the right page and two hundred and eighty one on the left the back side of it. If I didn't do that count ahead of time and tell where we are in the whole thing, then you might get a count off, which we did in earlier by a couple of pages. So you got two hundred and eighty three on the front and then two hundred and seventy nine in the back. You made some mistakes somewhere, we don't know where, So that was a mundane thing, but it was four hours for each manuscript. On average, three hundred manuscripts in twenty fifteen and sixteen. I spent a lot of time in Athens. It was my second home. And when i'd get done with handling these manuscripts and writing up the metadata on them, I worked in the manuscript room at the National Library that had no air conditioning, and I worked especially during the summers. Athens is like Dallas. It gets about the same kind of weather that Dallas does year round, and it would be ninety five degrees in the manuscript room and there was no air conditionings. I said, So what I would do is I'd start bringing a handtel from the hotel. And I like to stay well hydrated. Couldn't do it then because of the risk sweating on the manuscripts. So I'd bring this handtwel and I'd sweat out in the first fifteen twenty minutes and just soak the towel so that I would not drop sweats on the manuscripts. And so by the end of the day this is twenty fifteen, I could walk maybe fifty yards. I'd get to the taxi which was right there. He'd take me to the hotel, and I'd go to the hotel, get on my bed, and I'd lie there writhing in pain for the next two hours, in part because of dehydration, but in part because the encephalitis is still in my system. And what's happened even to this day is if I get too tired or too hot, one of the first things that happens is my legs begin to tingle, and then I can't walk. And so it was important for me to actually cause suffering to get these manuscripts digitized. And yet it's because of the value of the Word of God. So the encephalitis still weeks have econmy at times. There's not every places nearly as comfortable as air conditioned America when we go shoot you know, well, you. 00:38:09 Speaker 1: Know I've seen in our travels together, you fight through some painful moments and struggling times to make sure that we were able to see the work, to see the manuscripts, to understand what's behind them, and see you fight through that process because we were dealing with the Word of God. When I think about suffering, the big passage that comes to mind from me is set in Corinthians one Versus three three eleven, because he has this extended time where it seems like Paul is almost at the point of suicide. He was afflicted to the point of, yeah, he was almost ready to throw in the towel. But then he talks about this God who comforts us so that we might comfort others. 00:39:02 Speaker 2: Exactly. That's so there is a. 00:39:04 Speaker 1: Ministry component to this that we cannot lose sight of in our own pain. 00:39:11 Speaker 2: And what made me think. 00:39:12 Speaker 1: Of that again when Lois was struggling with cancer, there was another lady in our church struggling with cancer, and she picked up the phone and called to pray with this other lady while she herself is dying, that God would comfort and heal her. 00:39:35 Speaker 2: So this thing. 00:39:35 Speaker 1: Of administering to others who are going through a simular the same thing you're going through, so that the God of all comfort can comfort you as you're comforting others, extending the grace that you yourself need, even to the point where you giving up on anything for yourself. That passage, to me, has been an illuminating, encouraging one for this my set that we're saying we need to have when we're going through things that are causing us hurt. And pain and need God for us. 00:40:07 Speaker 2: Couldn't say it better. That's exactly why we go through the suffering. It's not, as I said, as far our character bringing us more christ Like, but it's also so that we can relate to others who are going through this kind of thing. There have been so many people that unfortunately have made wrong decisions when it comes to who God is and who Christ is, and they'll say, well, my mother died in a car accident. There is no God that kind of a thing. You remind them of what Jesus Christ has gone through, and that God knows suffering personally in the God Man himself, and you remind them of what the apostle Paul has gone through. And if you've gone through suffering in your own life, you share those stories to say out the other end is God who is comforting us. And that's the only thing we can cling to. Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and forever the same. He's the one we cling to through the word. 00:41:07 Speaker 1: Well, one of the things you mentioned you had to you had to relearn some things, including your love for Greek and I've wrote other lessons that that came as a result of you Encephalite has talked to me about that relearning process and anything else that that God taught you through this experience. 00:41:23 Speaker 2: Yea, when I was in college, I had four years of Greek, but I wasn't very good at and my first year I almost flunked, and you're kidding. In fact, I deserved to flunk, but the professor had compassion on me. And in second year Greek, I took a different professor. In the first five weeks, we got an exam every week review exam of first year Greek. I got an F on the first exam. I got an F on the second exam. I got an F on the third exam. But on the fourth exam I got a high F a high failure. 00:42:11 Speaker 1: Okay, And on. 00:42:12 Speaker 2: The fifth exam I got a D mis And I said, hey, I'm getting this And the professor called me into his office and he said, young man, I think you need to drop out of Greek. You're not warning it. And that's I was so blinded that I thought, Jam, I'm doing okay. Mediocrity was fine with me at a Christian college. When he said that to me, I went down to my dorm rooms. I got on my knees. I said, Lord Jesus, I've been dragging your name through the mud. If I were taking Greek at a secular school, they would be dragging your name through the mud the professor. Because I chose to do a mediocre job, I need to do this for the glory of Jesus Christ. And so that year I ended up getting highest grade in the class. 00:43:01 Speaker 1: Wow. 00:43:03 Speaker 2: So even though I learned that lesson, I still did not have my fundamentals of Greek down well. And so when I came to Dallas Seminary, I wanted to skip out of first year Greek. Well, you had to take a test, and I studied for forty hours a week while I'm working forty hours a week all summer long, while my wife is also working forty hours a week. It was a challenging summer. But I did so well on that entrance exam that they said, you can skip third semester Greek get right into fourth. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to get the syntax from Dallas Seminary starting the third semester. But I had to relearn Greek that summer because of how poorly I had learned it in college and then in nineteen ninety seven, when I got the encephalitis, I had to learn it all over again. And I mentioned that I had just finished my grammar that I had spent seventeen years writing the year before. I mean, it got published the year before, and I forgot most of it at least. Trouble interviewed me for his book, The Case for the Real Jesus, which is kind of a follow up on the Case for Christ. And he had interviewed Bruce Metzker in the first book on textra criticism. He interviewed me for this second book, which was what an honor it was to have him in my home having him interview me for that chapter. And he put together something that I had never thought about before. And I read through the interview wanted me to approve it before it got published, and A go, oh, no, that's not right. He said, here's a man who learned Greek by teaching himself Greek from the textbook that he had written. I said, well, actually, yeah, that is right. So I had never put it together that way, but Struggle did. And that's exactly what happened. There were times as I was teaching second year Greek that next fall semester that I would simply not remember large sections of the grammar, and I'd get frustrated. I'd say, what is this guy trying to say? Oh, this guy is me. I should have been clearer, and other times, oh that's a good insight, and then you can't say that that's bragging. It was a weird experience, almost an out of body. It was an out of mind experience. 00:45:36 Speaker 1: You're teaching you from you about something you. 00:45:41 Speaker 2: Well, that's me. I am still relearning my Greek. There's pockets that are still I still have. 00:45:48 Speaker 1: To well, I got luo luis. 00:45:53 Speaker 2: That's where you start, that's where you start. So during that first year, a student I had to drive me to school and he had a truck. He'd pick me up, we'd put the wheelchair in the back, and he drove me to school every day for a year. I needed help in a lot of ways. Now. There was one day that I drove myself to school in the fall semester. I had a stick shift car. I couldn't drive out, but I could drive my wife's minivan, I thought, And so I drove down to school because one of our faculty members had just died and there was going to be a memorial service for him, and Chucks Windall was was going to be speaking giving the eulogy, and so I said, Patty, I've got to drive the minivan. She was at work that day, so she had to drive my stick shift. She hates that carpet. Anyway, I drove her minivan, and then I got to the church after school, went to the memorial service. There was a meal afterwards, and so I was able to eat and enjoy some fellowship. When I got out to the minivan and I'm wheeling myself out, I'm standing there trying to put the wheelchair in the car and I couldn't lift it. I was there for probably twenty minutes trying to lift it. I didn't know what to do, and I thought, well, I'll just go in the car and sleep in the back until morning. That's what I was figured i'd need to do. Didn't have cell phones back in ninety seven, and so there was another car in the parking lot. I didn't know whose it was, but I just pretty much gave up. It was Chuck and Cynthia and all. Chuck came over and said, Dan, looks like you need some help. Yeah, how good? Dairy is he is? And he said, he said, let me help you with this. So he sticks the wheelchair in the car and he drives me home and Cynthia follows, and I got out of the car and went into the house. I said, guys, you got to come out here. You have no idea who's in our driveway. But he was ministering to me after he had just spent a day ministering to the whole body of Christ about this fallen faculty member who died, Dave Edwards. And it was really a profound, humbling ministry that he took on himself. And I'll never forget that one of the great lessons. And I'd say it was a great surprise to us. It came out of left field. You know, I'm reconnecting my intellectual life with my spiritual life. That lesson really came back to me when my son had cancer and with the encephalitis. I was already putting those two together. But what I had not put together was the body of Christ. We you know, I was in and out of the hospital so often, and it was just wearing Patty out. The boys didn't know what was going on, and people brought us meals. They brought us dinner for months months, and on top of that that was from our church. Others from other places brought us meals. And then there was a church down in Houston where I had ministered before a few times, and they paid for virtually all of my medical costs. Oh it was thousands of dollars. And what I came away realizing is, oh, my gosh, it's not just character. The Lord is building. He's building his body, and they, just the Body of Christ loves to minister to those who are in need. And when we keep our suffering to ourselves the body of Christ is they miss out on being able to give you a blessing. And that's what the body does. So I learned a great and very humbling lesson because it wasn't academia, wasn't scholarship, it wasn't exegesis. It was lay people who didn't know any Greek and whose theology was probably pretty primitive at times, who were the hands and feet of Jesus ministering to me. 00:50:04 Speaker 1: Well, that's real practical then, Why people should be connected to a spiritual body so that you can receive or you can give. 00:50:14 Speaker 2: Don't neglect the gathering of her shells together, as the author of Hebrews should. 00:50:19 Speaker 1: With all the struggles that you were dealing with with encephalitis, and yet you kept going back to your work, which is textual criticism. 00:50:30 Speaker 2: What drove you? 00:50:31 Speaker 1: What was the passion behind doing that, especially going through what you were going through. 00:50:37 Speaker 2: You know, Jesus really changed my life. But I made a radical commitment to Christ when I was sixteen, and I committed my life to full time Christian vocational ministry at that point, so there is no turning back. When I had the encephalitis and I lost my languages and I'm trying to relearn Hebrew and Greek and you know all the other stuff that I learned, I wasn't even thinking of dropping out of ministry. This is what God had called me to. And then I had always this fascination with the manuscripts of actually looking at each unique handwritten document that scribes hundreds of years. Sometimes seventeen eighteen hundred years ago, wrote that we still have in existence today to look at these handwritten copies of scripture. It's been just a thrill to be able to do that, and more than a thrill if it were not for these scribes, we would not know Jesus because the incarnate word is known through the written word, and the written word is known through these faithful men and women's scribes over the centuries, who copied in some of the worst conditions possible. And if I'm in a place where it's ninety five degrees and I'm hydrated, it doesn't even come close to comparing to the kind of situations they these scribes faced. I consider my work, the work of CS and TMP, to be an extension of what they did. They the scribes actually did not even have writing desks for the first seven or eight hundred years. They have the manuscript on their knees writing it out. How do you do that for centuries? And there's a we have a manuscript, we photographed a manuscript that there's a prayer at the end of the manuscript and the scribe says, it's about one thousand years after AD something like that. And the scribe says, Lord, if it's possible, please find a writing desk for me. The scribe a thousand years later still has to bend over, hunched back on and write this manuscript out on his knees, six hours a day, six days a week. It was just brutal work. Who am I to say it's difficult for me, It's a torture for me. These people have We're just standing on the shoulder of these faithful men and women to bring the worth God to folks today. Textual criticism is the discipline of trying to get back to the original wording of a document whose originals have disappeared or dissolved that we don't have them anymore. We have to do that even with modern things, Shakespeare's plays, for example, we have to do textra criticism on that Lincoln's Gettysburg address. There were no tape recorders when he gave his address, there were eyewitnesses. His secretaries produced some drafts that were after the fact. We think newspaper reporters did it. But there are five basic copies of the Gettysburg Address and they don't agree with each other exactly. So to do textra criticism to try to determine the wording of the original of the Gettysburg address, What are they going to put up at the Lincoln Monument. They had to do textra criticism to figure that out. Same thing with the New Testament. It has suffered the same kind of deterioration that other ancient writings have, except that there are far more copies of the New Testament than anything else from the Greco Roman world. And we have far earlier copies of the New Testament than anything else from the Greco Roman world. 00:54:31 Speaker 1: Somewhere like fifty seven hundred. 00:54:33 Speaker 2: Fifty seven hundred manuscripts in Greek alone, and it started to get translated into ancient languages Latin and Coptic and Syriac starting in the late second early third century. Those versions are very important to give as it kind of freezes the Greek manuscript they had at that time into that version. So we may not have that manuscript that they had from say the early second century, but we have a translation it coming one hundred years five hundred years later sometimes, and that tells us what that Greek manuscript said. 00:55:06 Speaker 1: So this is a way for us to know that the text we have now is trustworthy because of the work of textual criticism. 00:55:14 Speaker 2: Exactly. Text your criticism is the foundation of all human knowledge. When it comes to documents before the time in the printing press, it's absolutely necessary. It's always been considered the great humanities discipline, not just humanities, but when it came to the first time the Greek New Testament was published on a printing press in fifteen sixteen by Erasmus. He had to use manuscripts, and he had to make decisions on the basis of those manuscripts as to what he's going to print if there's going to be overlap between them. And since that time there have been millions of man and woman hours put into the study of the Greek New Testament. There have been scholars. One scholar went to the Vatican and wanted to look at Codex Vaticanus, a fourth century manuscript that originally had the whole Bible. It's a huge manuscript. It's just beautiful, and it's one of the two or three most important mainuscripts we have of the Greek New Testament, because even though it's written in the mid three hundreds, its text goes back very early. It's in most places, i'd say it goes back to the original wording. It's extremely important. Well, this Protestants scribe is at the Vatican in the mid eighteen hundreds and he has two monks standing there. He's not allowed to touch the manuscript. And when I looked at Vaticanis, I was not allowed to touch it. I spent a week with it also in the Vatican manuscript room, and these monks were standing there and he was not allowed to take any notes. He's looking at the text, and when they felt that he was memorizing, then they'd turned the page, so he couldn't memorize much. This went on for a week. He goes back to his cell every night and he writes down what he remembered. That's incredible. He's doing tech criticism of this manuscript from memory. It's been a discipline to get us back to the original wording and through these imperfect copies that we have written by frail human beings who might have a bad memory, a poor handwriting. They might have copies where they look at two different copies and they say, I'm going to follow this one, and they make mistakes about that they read something wrong in a line, that they might skip a line, or they might add a line. There are so many mistakes in our manuscripts that the best estimate we have is somewhere around one and a half million differences among our Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. A million and a half. Now, you might say, if you all have that status that you'd say, Oh my gosh, how could we ever possibly get back to the original. Well, here's the thing. Over seventy percent of them are just spelling differences or nonsense. Easy to get back to those. It's like if you saw a manuscript, a handwritten manuscript of the Constitution, and you're reading the preamble, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect onion. Oh, you know, it's not on unit's union. So most of these mistakes can easily be corrected. There's a bunch of them. I don't know what the percentage is, maybe fifteen percent that can even be translated to the differences. I did an exercise once. It took me eight hours to write out how many ways can you say John loves Mary in Greek? Eight hours and I didn't finish the task. I came up with three hundred and forty eighty four different ways to say John loves Mary. Because word orders can different. The same word for loves agapallo each time, and at present tense, there's different spelling for John, different spellings for Mary. They use the article with each name or they don't, or with both names or neither, and you're. 00:59:08 Speaker 1: Having the time of your life doing as. 00:59:10 Speaker 2: Out to do this, and I figured, I think I proved my point. Actually, there were another one hundred and fifty that I could have produced, and then I completely forgot about another entire construction. So I would have to say there are over one thousand ways that you can say John loves Mary in Greek without changing the meaning at all, just slight emphasis difference. That's it. Now. If we have that many different ways to say John loves Mary in Greek where it doesn't change the meaning, how many variants could we have among our New Testament manuscripts where the meaning is not touched? Millions upon millions, billions, perhaps. 00:59:52 Speaker 1: So a question that a person might ask, that well student might ask, is God, why not just leave the originals so we don't have to go through all this? And I'm sure you've heard that question a multitude of times, to which your response is, if God left. 01:00:11 Speaker 2: Us with the originals, they would probably be enshrined and put in some kind of a sanctuary idolatry of that way we go, Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's a church in Ethiopia that says they have the original arc of the Covenant, but nobody gets to see it. Oh, that's the kind of thing that would happen, and it would just be worshiped. But it's not that God did not leave us the original because it would be worshiped. In a sense, what God did is exactly what has happened to all ancient literature. We don't have the originals of any Greco Roman literature, none of it, because it's gone through the process of deterioration over the centuries. What we do have, though, or early copies, we have portions of John's Gospel within decades. When John wrote the Gospel, I think sus do is put it this way. He said, when a miracle enters into the natural realm, time, space, history, the normal effects of what happens in life takes place. If you have supernatural pregnancy, it will end in a birth of a child, namely one Jesus. That's the only one. If you create wine at a wedding, it's going to be possible to get people drunk. If you create fish and lows for five thousand, it's five thousand men, not counting women and children, it's fifteen twenty thousand people there. You're going to get your your bellies filled. When the miracle happens. And I take it that the writing of scripture by these apostles and their associates, it was done by the superintendents of the Holy Spirit, so that they wrote in complete control of their faculties, with their own personality, and yet the Holy Spirit superintendent over the writing. So it's exactly what he wanted to have written. As well. As soon as you get copies made, now you're can have. 01:02:16 Speaker 1: It enters into the natural human processes, right. 01:02:19 Speaker 2: And so one scholar said just three hundred years ago, he said, in fact that the more manuscripts we have, the more anchors we have to tell us what the original is. And so more manuscripts is actually far better than just having one or two. If he had just one manuscript, then we wouldn't know if it goes back to the original or not. It's the only thing we've got. And the problem with much Greco Roman literature is they sometimes have very serious gaps of a particular author's writings, sometimes entire books by Livy that are simply gone. We know he wrote far more than we have, but you also have manuscripts. The average manuscript for the Greco Roman author doesn't come We don't have any for about a thousand years after they wrote. You take Xenophon, for example, one of the great historians of ancient Greece. We're waiting eighteen hundred years before we get any our first substantial copy of Hellenica. Now what if you waited eighteen hundred years before you got your first substantial copy of the New Testament. That means we'd have a copy right around the time the Wright brothers invented the airplane. Then the skeptics would have something to claim. But you look at all of these differences we have, and when it really boils down to it, those that are both meaningful that is, it changes the meaning to some degree and viable. That's a critical term that as it could possibly go back to the original wording. It's no more than one tenth of one percent of all of the differences. That's a very small amount. What's at stake. Not a single doctrine is affected by any of these variants. That's huge. That's that's incredible. What can you say about any other ancient literature that we do we know if the author author's writings have changed significantly, we can't get back to it. Yes, that's that's the case for much of it, if not most of it. New Testament, as the capstan of God's revelation, is in a unique place. 01:04:32 Speaker 1: Well, you've you've helped us to understand textual criticism, You've helped us to benefit from it, and your work will continue because it helps us to know that the word of God we read, study, reach, teach is a trustworthy word from a perfect God. 01:04:52 Speaker 2: Absolutely it is. It's amazing. But I want people to make sure that when they hear about this, they don't just hear the apologetic value. They open the word, they read the written word, which testifies of the incarnate Word, because it is not the Bible that saves us, but Jesus Christ himself. 01:05:13 Speaker 1: Amen.