Why Take Up This BattleThis page is intended to let the reader know why I
joined in the fight for the King James Bible.
Before the first Bible critic e-mails me to ask me why I am taking up this battle, I will do you all a favor and tell you. It all started for me in the summer of 1987. I was walking back to my chair in the reception center at Fort Benning, GA. Before I ever reached my chair a man carrying a box offered me a little book. I grabbed it and as I was shoving it into my pocket, I noticed it was a Bible. I knew what a Bible was. After all I was born and raised a Roman Catholic. We had a reading from the Catholic Bible during mass every week. But here I was almost eighteen years old and unable to quote you one verse from the Bible. Catholic school did not teach it to us. My parents never taught me the Bible. I was steeped in a religion as a young man. This religion had no answers to my drug addiction. The priest never told me how to know Christ. The church never condemned my alcoholism. I remember my priest falling down drunk at "Mardi Gras" every year. My life had spiralled downward for several years. In a last ditch effort to straighten my life out and please the judge, I joined the Army National Guard. My brother, sister, and mother had all been saved and I was fed up with hearing their preaching. So I decided to get straight without God. I did not know God would follow me to Georgia. But moved by my mother's prayers, the Lord was after me hard. So He leads this total stranger to give me the one thing I didn't want in Georgia, a Bible. I never had any intentions on reading the Bible I was given, but I did not want to offend, so I tucked it away.
As basic training progressed, it became clear that the Lord was not done dealing with me. Several incidents would bring me to my knees. I got poison oak so bad that my eyes swelled shut for a week. I was issued boots that were too small and ended up in the Martin Army Hospital for four days. These things, in addition to the hard time I was having running (I was a chain smoker and a pot head), made me search for help from above.
I began to read the New Testament after lights out every night. I had never read the Bible before. This went on night after hot, Georgia night. I came in exhausted every night, but after everyone went to sleep I read that little New Testament. One night I came under conviction while reading in John chapter three about Nicodemus. I was troubled the whole next day while training. I feared missing Heaven as I pondered the changed life that my brother, sister, and mother experienced. I couldn't wait for my drill sergeant to go home that night, so I could take out my pen light and hide under that green, wool, army blanket with this amazing Book that seemed to be calling me. That night I read about the infamous woman at the well and her meeting with Jesus Christ. What hit home with me that night is when Jesus told her that He had water to offer her that could make her to never thirst again. Right in the midst of reading this passage, God spoke to my heart and I realized that a drink of this water, the water of eternal life, was what I needed. This water was what I was searching for my entire life. I rolled out of bed onto the floor and repented of my sins and asked Jesus Christ to forgive me and save me. Right then and there I became a child of the living God!
You might still be wondering what this has to do with the Bible version debate. Let me sum it up by saying this: There was no preacher preaching the night I got saved. There was no altar call, no one playing "Just As I Am" repeatedly, and no super-soulwinner dragging me down to the altar. God intervened in my life, personally, by having one of His servants give me a copy of His Holy Word. Did you get that? What saved my life was a Book, but not just any book, the only Book in Heaven or on earth that was penned down by the Creator God. From that hot, July night in Fort Benning, Georgia in 1987, to this day (9/20/08) more than twenty years have passed. But never one time from that day to this day have I doubted that God has given to man His Holy Word. When I say His Holy Word, I mean all of it. When I say His Holy Word, I'm referring to The Book (A.V. 1611) that changed this old, rotten, dope head into a preacher of the Gospel.
My first major challenge to face would happen at Bible College, of all places. Maranatha Baptist Bible College, in my opinion, ought to change their name to Maranatha College. I've often wondered how you can have a Bible College when you don't even have a Bible. It was there that the well refined, highly educated, scholarly professors who were not personal soul-winners tried to undermine my faith in God's Word. Often the KJB was corrected with the Westcott/Hort text. I assure you I did not let it pass one single time. When I went to the head of the Bible department to complain (weekly), I was assured that this would change and that my position should be accommodated. I look back now and laugh at how naive I was. This promise came from a man who is on his third position on the text, himself. I found out he was in the Burgon Society years ago, then took up Art Farstad and Zane Hodges Majority text position (this text underlies the NKJV). At the present, he holds his doctorate from liberal Trinity Evangelical Seminary, and is a critical text guy (he must be as that is the text used in class, and all his teachers hold this position). I began to study this issue in the midst of imperative circumstances. I would leave classes for the day and hit the books, discovering that what I was being taught on the text issue was Catholic, liberal garbage. I saw what was happening to the other preacher boys and I did not want to be a faithless dud for God. What I learned in this time was a wonderful wealth of eye opening information. I do owe the professors at Maranatha a debt of gratitude. Had they not attacked my Bible, I would not have been able to be strong enough to help so many come to the right position on the KJB (it backfired, boys!).
As you have already deduced from this narrative, I came to a Holy Ghost conviction about the infallibility of the King James Bible long before I ever spent one minute studying the issue. To some, this will seem like a simplistic platform to launch from; but others will realize that faith has to be the foundation for every position/conviction to which we hold. I will shortly present all the facts I've discovered about the perfection of the King James Bible--- and there are many! But, be it known to you who would criticize God's Holy Word, ye who spend your hours in dusty studies pouring over your Greek and Hebrew, that even if I came to a place where it didn't seem like God preserved His Word in the English language, or if I did not have all the facts that I do, I would still know for certain that God did preserve His Word, because this He has promised to me, and I believe the God who saved me, by faith! This is something that the average Bible corrector cannot understand. After all, I've never met anyone who was NIV only. That is to say, that some have faith in the clear promises of God and some do not. I've found that the crowd that does not believe in the KJB does not believe in any Bible. It all has to come down to faith.
*In conclusion, I am not so much taking up this battle now, as much as I am simply continuing to defend my Bible. The Bible that so many liberals have tried to attack, steal, correct, and undermine. And now, the facts.....